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AUTOBIOGRAPHY 



UNIFORM LIBEARY EDITION OF THE MISCELLANEOUS 
WORKS OF JOHN STUART MILL. 

Tinted and laid paper, 8vo, $2.25 per vol. (except vol. on Comte. 
The Autobiography. 1 vol. 
Dissertations and Discussions. 4 vols. 
Considerations on Representative Government. 1vol. 
Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy. 

2 vols. 
On Liberty; The Subjection of Women, Both in 1vol. 
Comte's Positive Philosophy. 1 vol., $1.50. 

CHEAPER EDITIONS. 

Representative Government. 12mo, plain, $1.50. 
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o 

MEMORIAL VOLUME. 

John Stuart Mill : His Life and Works. 

Twelve slcefcches, as follows : Hi? Life, by J. E. Fox Boume ; His 
Career in the India House, by W. T. Thornton ; His Moral Character, 
by Herbert Spencer ; Hig Botanical Studies, by Henry Turner ; His 
Place as a Critic, by W. Minto ; His Work in Philosophy, by J. H. 
Levy ; His Studies in Morals and Jurisprudence, by W. A. Hunter ; 
His Work in Political Economy, by J. E. Cairnes ; His Influence at 
the TJniversities, by Henry Fawcett; His Influence as a Practical 
Politician, by Mrs. Fawcett ; His Eelation to Positivism, by Frederic 
Harrison ; His Position as a Philosopher, by W. A. Hunter. 16mo, 
price, $1.00. 

HENRY HOLT & CO., Publishers, N. Y. 



I_ 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY 



BY 



JOHIsT STUART MILL 




/? 




NEW YORK 
HENEY HOLT AISTD COMPA]S"Y 

1873. 






PUBLISHED BY ABBANGEMENT WITH THE AUTHOB'S 
EXECUTOB. 



n 



CONTENTS. 

, CHAPTER I. 

1806—1819. 
Childhood and Early Education, 1. 

CHAPTER n. 

1813—1821. 

Moral Influences in Early Youth, 38. My Father's Character and 
Opinions, 46. 

CHAPTER III. 
1821—1823. 

Last Stage of Education and first of Self-Education, 62. 

CHAPTER IV. 

1823—1828. 
Youthful Propagandism, 87, 113. Westminster Review, 91, 129. 

CHAPTER Y. 

1826—1832. 
A Crisis in my Mental History, 132. One Stage Onward, 141. 



CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER VL 

1830—1840. 

Commencement of the most valuable Friendship of my Life, 184. 
My Father's Death, 202. Writings and other Proceedings up 
to 1840, 206. 

CHAPTER Vn. 

1840—1870. 

General View of the Remainder of my Life, 221, 227, 278, 308 :— 
Completion of the System of Logic, 222. Publication of the 
Principles of Political Economy, 234. Marriage, 240. Re- 
tirement from the India House, 248. Publication of " Liberty," 
251. Considerations on Representative Government, 264. 
Civil War in America, 266. Examination of Sir William 
Hamilton's Philosophy, 272. Parliamentary Life, 280. Re- 
mainder of my Life, 308, 



CHAPTEE L 



CPIILDHOOD AND EAKLY EDUCATION. 

TT seems proper that I should prefix to the following 
biographical sketch, some mention of the reasons 
which have made me think it desirable that I should 
leave behind me such a memorial ot so uneventful a 
life as mine. I do not for a moment imagine that 
any part of what I have to relate, can be interesting 
to the public as a narrative, or as being connected 
with myself But I have thought that in an age in 
which education, and its improvement, are the subject 
of more, if not of profounder study than at any 
former period of English history, it may be useful 
that there should be some record of an education 
which was unusual and remarkable, and which, 
whatever else it may have done, has proved how 
much more than is commonly supposed may be 
taught, and well taught, in those early years which, 
in the common modes of what is called instruc- 
tion, are little better than wasted. It has also 
seemed to me that in an age of transition in opinions, 
there may be somewhat both of interest and of 
benefit in noting the successive phases of any mind 



2 CHILDHOOD AND EAELY EDUCATION. 

wHcli was always pressing forward, equally ready to 
learn and to unlearn either from its own thoughts or 
from those of others. But a motive which weighs 
more with me than either of these, is a desire to 
make acknowledgment of the debts which my 
intellectual and moral development owes to other 
persons ; some of them of recognised eminence, 
others less known than they deserve to be, and the 
one to whom most of all is due, one whom the world 
had no opportunity of knowing. The reader whom 
these things do not interest, has only himself to 
blame if he reads farther, and I do not desire any 
other indulgence from him than that of bearing in 
mind, that for him these pages were not written. 

I was born in London, on the 20th of May, 1806, 
and was the eldest son of James Mill, the author of 
the History of British India. My father, the son 
of a petty tradesman and (I believe) small farmer, at 
North water Bridge, in the county of Angus, was, 
when a boy, recommended by his abilities to the 
notice of Sir John Stuart, of Fettercairn, one of the 
Barons of the Exchequer in Scotland, and was, in 
consequence, sent to the University of Edinburgh, at 
the expense of a fund established by Lady Jane 
Stuart (the wife of Sir John Stuart) and some other 
ladies for educating young men for the Scottish 
Church. He there went through the usual course 
of study, and was licensed as a Preacher, but never 



CHILDHOOD AND EAELY EDUCATION. 3 

followed the profession ; having satisfied himself that 
he could not believe the doctrines of that or any- 
other Church. For a few years he v^as a private tutor 
in various families in Scotland, among others that 
of the Marquis of Tweeddale, but ended by taking 
up his residence in London, and devoting himself to 
authorship. Nor had he any other means of support 
until 1819, when he obtained an appointment in the 
India House. 

In this period of my father's life there are two 
things which it is impossible not to be struck with : 
one of them unfortunately a very common circum- 
stance, the other a most uncommon one. The first 
is, that in his position, with no resource but the 
precarious one of writing in periodicals, he married 
and had a large family ; conduct than which nothing 
could be more opposed, both as a matter of good 
sense and of duty, to the opinions which, at least at 
a later period of life, he strenuously upheld. The 
other circumstance, is the extraordinary energy which 
was required to lead the life he led, with the disad- 
vantages under which he laboured fi:om the first, and 
with those which he brought upon himself by his 
marriage. It would have been no small thing, had 
he done no more than to support himself and his 
family during so many years by writing, without 
ever being in debt, or in any pecuniary difficulty | 
holding, as he did, opinions, both in politics and in 

B 2 



4 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 

religion, which were more odious to all persons -of 
influence, and to the common run of prosperous 
Englishmen in that generation than either before or 
since ; and being not only a man whom nothing 
wotdd have induced to write against his convic- 
tions, but one who invariably threw into everything 
he wrote, as much of his convictions as he thought 
the circumstances would in any way permit : being, 
it must also be said, one who never did anything 
negligently ; never undertook any task, literary or 
other, on which he did not conscientiously bestow all 
the labour necessary for performing it adequately. 
But he, with these burdens on him, planned, com- 
menced, and completed, the History of India ; and 
this in the course of about ten years, a shorter 
time than has been occupied (even by writers who 
had no other employment) in the production of almost 
any other historical work ox equal bulk, and of any- 
thing approaching to the same amount of reading 
and research. And to this is to be added, that during 
the whole period, a considerable part of almost every 
day was employed in the instruction of his children : 
in the case of one of whom, myself, he exerted an 
amount of labour, care, and perseverance rarely, if 
ever, employed for a similar purpose, in endeavour- 
ing to give, according to his own conception, the 
highest order of intellectual education. 

A man who, in his own practice, so vigorously 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 5 

acted up to the principle of losing no time, was likely 

to adhere to the same rule in the instruction of his 

l| 
pupil. I have no remembrance of the time when I 

began to learn Greek, I have been told that it was 

when I was three years old. My earliest recollection 

on the subject, is that of committing to memory what 

my father termed vocables, being lists of common 

Greek words, with their signification in English, 

which he wrote out for me on cards. Of grammar, 

until some years later, I learnt no more than the 

inflexions of the nouns and verbs, but, after a course 

of vocables, proceeded at once to translation ; and I 

faintly remember going through ^sop's Fables, 

the first Greek book which I read. The Anabasis, 

which I remember better, was the second. I learnt 

no Latin until my eighth year. At that time I had 

read, under my father's tuition, a number of Greek 

prose authors, among whom I remember the whole 

of Herodotus, and of Xenophon's Cyropsedia and 

Memorials of Socrates ; some of the lives of the 

philosophers by Diogenes Laertius ; part of Lucian, 

and Isocrates ad Demonicum and Ad Nicoclem. I 

also read, in 1813, the first six dialogues (in the 

common arrangement) of Plato, from the Euthyphron 

to the Theoctetus inclusive : which last dialogue, I 

venture to think, would have been better omitted, 

as it was totally impossible I should understand it. 

But my father, in all his teaching, demanded of me 



6 CHILDHOOD AND EAULY EDUCATION. 

not only tlie utmost that I could do, but mucli tliat I 
could by no possibility bave done. What he was 
himself willing to undergo for the sake of my instruc- 
tion, may be judged from the fact, that I went through 
the whole process of preparing my Greek lessons in 
the same room and at the same table at which he 
was writing : and as in those days Greek and English 
lexicons were not, and I could make no more use 
of a Greek and Latin lexicon than could be made 
without having yet begun to learn Latin, I was 
forced to have recourse to him for the meaning of 
every word which I did not know. This incessant 
interruption, he, one of the most impatient of men, 
submitted to, and wrote under that interruption 
several volumes of his History and all else that he 
had to write during those years. 

The only thing besides Greek, that I learnt as a 
lesson in this part of my childhood, was arithmetic : 
this also my father taught me : it was the task of 
the evenings, and I well remember its disagreeable- 
ness. But the lessons were only a part of the daily 
instruction I received. Much of it consisted in the 
books I read by myself, and my father's discourses to 
me, chiefly during our walks. From 1810 to the end 
of 1813 we were living in Newington Green, then an 
almost rustic neighbourhood. My father's health 
required considerable and constant exercise, and he 
walked habitually before breakfast, generally in the 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 7 

green lanes towards Hornsey. In these walks I always 
accompanied him, and with my earliest recollections 
of green fields and wild flowers, is mingled that of 
the account I gave him daily of what I had read 
the day before. To the best of my remembrance, 
this was a voluntary rather than a prescribed exer- 
cise. I made notes on slips of paper while reading, 
and from these in the morning walks, I told- the story 
to him ; for the books were chiefly histories, of which 
I read in this manner a great number : Robertson's 
histories, Hume, Gibbon ; but my greatest delight, 
then and for long afterwards, was Watson's Philip 
the Second and Third. The heroic defence of the 
Knights of Malta against the Turks, and of the 
revolted Provinces of the Netherlands against Spain, 
excited in me an intense and lasting interest. Next 
to Watson, my favourite historical reading was 
Hooke's History of Rome. Of Greece I had seen 
at that time no regular history, except school abridg- 
ments and the last two or three volumes of a trans- 
lation of Rollin's Ancient History, beginning 
with Philip of Macedon. But I read with great 
delight Langhorne's translation of Plutarch. In 
English history, beyond the time at which Hume 
leaves ofl', I remember reading Burnet's History of 
his Own Time, though I ca,red little for anything in 
it exce]3t the wars and battles ; and the historical 
part of the " Annual Register," from the beginning 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 



:o about 1788, where the volumes my father bor- 
rowed for me from Mr. Bentham left off. I felt a 
lively interest in Frederic of Prussia during his 
difficulties, and in Paoli, the Corsican patriot ; but 
when I came to the American war, I took my 
part, like a child as I was (until set right by my 
father) on the wrong side, because it was called the 
English side. In these frequent talks about the 
books I read, he used, as opportunity offered, to give 
me explanations and ideas respecting civilization, 
government, morality, mental cultivation, which he 
required me afterwards to restate to him in my own 
words. He also made me read, and give him a 
verbal account of, many books which would not have 
interested me sufficiently to induce me to read them 
of myself: among others, Millar's Historical View 
of the English Government, a book of great merit 
for its time, and which he highly valued ; Mosheim's 
Ecclesiastical History, McCrie's Life of John 
Knox, and even Sewell and Putty's Histories of 
the Quakers. He was fond ot putting into my 
hands books which exhibited men of energy and 
resource in unusual circumstances, struggling against 
difficulties and overcoming them : of such works 
I remember Beaver's African Memoranda, and 
Collins's Account of the First Settlement of New 
South Wales. Two books which I never wearied 
of reading were Anson's Voyages, so delightful to 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 9 

most young persons, and a collection (Hawkes- 
worth's, I believe) of Voyages round the World, in 
four volumes, beginning with Drake and ending with 
Cook and Bougainville. Of children's books, any 
more than of playthings, I had scarcely any, except 
an occasional gift from a relation or acquaintance : 
among those I had, Robinson Crusoe was pre- 
eminent, and continued to delight me through all 
my boyhood. It was no part, however, of my father's 
system to exclude books of amusement, though he 
allowed them very sparingly. Of such books he 
possessed at that time next to none, but he borrowed 
several for me ; those which I remember are the 
Arabian Nights, Cazotte's Arabian Tales, Don 
Quixote, Miss Edgeworth's Popular Tales, and a 
book of some reputation in its day, Brooke's Fool 
of Quality. 

In my eighth year I commenced learning Latin, 
in conjunction with a younger sister, to whom I 
taught it as I went on, and who afterwards repeated 
the lessons to my father : and from this time, other 
sisters and brothers being successively added as 
pupils, a considerable part of my day's work consisted 
of this preparatory teaching. It was a part which I 
greatly disliked ; the more so, as I was held respon- 
sible for the lessons of my pupils, in almost as full a 
sense as for my own : I, however, derived from this 
discipline the great advantage, of learning more 



10 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 

tliorougUy and retaining more lastingly the tilings 
which I was set to teach : perhaps, too, the practice 
it afforded in explaining difficulties to others, may 
even at that age have been useful. In other respects, 
the experience of my boyhood is not favourable to 
the plan of teaching children by means of one 
another. The teaching, I am sure, is very inefficient 
as teaching, and I well know that the relation be- 
tween teacher and taught is not a good moral 
discipline to either. I went in this manner through 
the Latin grammar, and a considerable part of 
Cornelius Nepos and Caesars Commentaries, but 
afterwards added to the superintendence of these 
lessons, much longer ones of my own. 

In the same year in which I began Latin, I made 
my first commencement in the Greek poets with the 
Iliad. After I had made some progress in this, my 
father put Pope s translation into my hands. It was 
the first English verse I had cared to read, and it 
became one of the books in which for many years 
I most delighted : I think I must have read it from 
twenty to thirty times through. I should not have 
thought it worth while to mention a taste apparently 
so natural to boyhood, if I had not, as I think, 
observed that the keen enjoyment of this brilliant 
specimen of narrative and versification is not so 
universal with boys, as I should have expected both 
a piiori and from my individual experience. Soon 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 11 

after this time I commenced Euclid, and somewhat 
later, Algebra, still under my father's tuition. 

From my eighth to my twelfth year, the Latin 
books which I remember reading were, the Bucolics 
of Virgil, and the first six books of the JEneid ; all 
Horace, except the Epodes ; the Fables of Phsedrus ; 
the first Rve books of Livy (to which from my love 
of the subject I voluntarily added, in my hours of 
leisure, the remainder of the first decade) ; all Sallust ; 
a considerable part of Ovid's Metamorphoses ; some 
plays of Terence ; two or three books of Lucretius ; 
several of the Orations of Cicero, and of his writings 
on ortitory; also his letters to Atticus, my father 
taking the trouble to translate to me from the 
French the historical explanations in Mingault's 
notes. In Greek I read the Iliad and Odyssey 
through ; one or two plays of Sophocles, Euripides, 
and Aristophanes, though by these I profited little"; 
all Thucydides ; the Hellenics of Xenophon ; a 
great part of Demosthenes, ^schines, and Lysias ; 
Theocritus; Anacreon; part of the Anthology; a little 
of Dionysius ; several books of Polybius ; and lastly 
Aristotle's Rhetoric, which, as the first expressly 
scientific treatise on any moral or jDsychological 
subject which I had read, and containing many of the 
best obser\^ations of the ancients on human nature 
and life, my father made me study with peculiar 
care, and throw the matter of it into synoptic 



12 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 

tables. During the same years I learnt elementary 
geometry and algebra thoroughly, the difFerential 
calculus, and other portions of the higher mathe- 
matics far from thoroughly : for my father, not 
having kept up this part of his early acquired know- 
ledge, could not spare time to qualify himself foi 
removing my difficulties, and left me to deal with 
them, with little other aid than that of books : while 
I was continually incurring his displeasure by my in- 
ability to solve difficult problems for which he did not 
see that I had not the necessary previous knowledge. 
As to my private reading, I can only speak oi what 
I remember. History continued to be my strongest 
predilection, and most of all ancient history. Mitford's 
Greece I read continually ; my father had put me on 
my guard against the Tory prejudices of this writer, 
and his perversions of facts for the whitewashing of 
despots, and blackening of popular institutions. 
These points he discoursed on, exemplifying them 
from the Greek orators and historians, with such 
effect that in reading Mitford my sympathies were 
always on the contrary side to those of the author, 
and I could, to some extent, have argued the point 
against him : yet this did not diminish the ever new 
pleasure with which I read the book. Ptoman 
history, both in my old favourite, Hooke, and in 
Ferguson, continued to delight me. A book which, 
in spite of what is called the dryness of its style, 



CHILDHOOD AND EAELY EDUCATION. 13 

I took great pleasure in, was the Ancient Universal 
History, through the incessant reading of which, I 
had my head full of historical details concerning 
the obscurest ancient people, while about modern 
history, except detached passages, such as the 
Dutch War of Independence, I knew and cared 
comparatively little. A voluntary exercise, to which 
throughout my boyhood I was much addicted, was 
what I called writing histories. I successively com- 
posed a Roman History, picked out of Hooke ; an 
Abridgment of the Ancient Universal History ; a 
History of Holland, from my favourite Watson and 
from an anonymous compilation ; and in my eleventh 
and twelfth year I occupied myself with writing 
what I flattered myself was something serious. This 
was no less than a History of the Roman Government, 
compiled (with the assistance of Hooke) from Livy 
and Dionysius : of which I wrote as much as would 
have made an octavo volume, extending to the epoch 
of the Licinian Laws. It was, in fact, an account of 
the struggles betM^een the patricians and plebeians, 
which now engrossed all the interest in my mind 
which I had previously felt in the mere wars and 
conquests of the Romans. I discussed all the con- 
stitutional points as they arose : though quite igno- 
rant of Niebuhr's researches, I, by such lights as my 
father had given me, vindicated the Agrarian Laws 
on the evidence of Livy, and upheld, to the best of 



14 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 

my ability, tlie Eoman Democratic party. A few 
years later, in my contempt of my childish efforts, I 
destroyed all these papers, not then anticipating that I 
could ever feel any curiosity about my first attempts at 
writing and reasoning. My father encouraged me in 
this useful amusement, though, as I think judiciously, 
he never asked to see what I wrote ; so that I did not 
feel that in writing it I was accountable to any one, nor 
had the chilling sensation of being under a critical eye. 
But though these exercises in history were never 
a compulsory lesson, there was another kind of com- 
position which was so, namely, writing verses, and 
it was one of the most disagreeable of my tasks. 
Greek and Latin verses I did not write, nor learnt the 
prosody of those languages. My father, thinking this 
not worth the time it required, contented himself 
with making me read aloud to him, and correcting 
false quantities. I never composed at all in Greek, 
even in prose, and but Httie in Latin. Not that my 
father could be indifferent to the value of this practice, 
in giving a thorough knowledge of these languages, 
but because there really was not time for it. The 
verses I was required to write were English. When 
I first read Pope's Homer, I ambitiously attempted to 
compose something of the same kind, and achieved as 
much as one book of a continuation of the Iliad. 
There, probably, the spontaneous promptings of my 
poetical ambition would have stopped ; but the 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATIOI^. l5 

exercise, begun from clioice, was continued by com- 
mand. Conformably to my father's usual practice of ex- 
plaining to me, as far as possible, the reasons for what 
he required me to do, he gave me, for this, as I well 
remember, two reasons highly characteristic of him : 
"one 'was, that some things could be expressed better 
and more forcibly in verse than in prose : this, he 
said, was a real advantage. The other was, that 
people in general attached more value to verse than 
it deserved, and the power of writing it, was, on this 
account, worth acquiring. He generally left me to 
choose my own subjects, which, as far as I remember, 
were mostly addresses to some mythological personage 
or allegorical abstraction ; but he made me translate 
into English verse many of Horace^s shorter poems : 
I also remember his giving me Thomson's " Winter" 
to read, and afterwards making me attempt (without 
book) to write something myself on the same subject. 
The verses I wrote were, of course, the merest rubbish, 
nor did I ever attain any facihty of versifigation, but 
the practice may have been useful in making it easier 
for me, at a later period, to acquire readiness of ex- 
pression.* I had read, up to this time, very little 



* In a subsequent stage of boyliood, when these exercises had 
ceased to be compulsory, like most youthful writers I wrote tragedies ; 
under the inspiration not so much of Shakspeare as of Joanna Baillie, 
whose " Constantine Paleologus " in particular appeared to me one of 
the most glorious of human compositions. I still think it one of the 
best dramas of the last two centuries. 



16 tlillLDHOOD AND EARLY iSDtJCATION". 

English poetry. Shakspeare my father had put into 
my hands, chiefly for the sake of the historical plays, 
from which, however, I went on to the others. My 
father never was a great admirer of Shakspeare, the 
English idolatry of whom he used to attack with 
some severity. He cared little for any English poetry 
except Milton (for whom he had the highest admira- 
tion). Goldsmith, Burns, and Gray's Bard, which he 
preferred to his Elegy : perhaps I may add Cowper 
and Beattie. He had some value for Spenser, and I re- 
member his reading to me (unlike his usual practice 
of making me read to him), the first book of the 
Fairie Queene ; but I took little pleasure in it. The 
poetry of the present century he saw scarcely any 
merit in, and I hardly became acquainted with any 
of it till I was grown up to manhood, except the 
metrical romances of Walter Scott, which I read at 
his recommendation and was intensely delighted 
with ; as I always was with animated narrative. 
Dryden's Poems were among my father's books, and 
many of these he made me read, but I never cared 
for any of them except Alexander's Feast, which, as 
well as many of the songs in Walter Scott, I used to 
sing internally, to a music of my own : to some of the 
latter, indeed, I went so far as to compose airs, which 
I still remember. Cowper 's short poems I read with 
some pleasure, but never got far into the longer ones ; 
and nothing in the two volumes interested me like 



CHILDHOOD AND EAELY EDUCATION. 17 

tlie prose accomit of his tliree hares. In my thirteenth 
year I met with Campbell's poems, among which 
Lochiel, Hohenlinden, The Exile of Erin, and 
some others, gave me sensations I had never before 
experienced from poetry. Here, too, I made nothing 
of the longer poems, except the striking opening of 
Gertrude of Wyoming, which long kept its place 
in my feelings as the perfection of pathos. 

During this part of my childhood, one of my greatest 
amusements was experimental science ; in the theo- 
retical, however, not the practical sense of the word ; 
not trying experiments — a kind of discipline which I 
have often regretted not having had — nor even seeing, 
but merely reading about them. I never remember 
being so wrapt up in any book, as I was in Joyce's 
Scientific Dialogues ; and I was rather recalcitrant 
to my father s criticisms of the bad reasoning respect- 
ing the first principles of physics, which abounds in the 
early part of that work. I devoured treatises on 
Chemistry, especially that of my father's early friend 
and schoolfellow. Dr. Thomson, for years before I 
attended a lecture or saw an experiment. 

From about the age of twelve, I entered into another 
and more advanced stage in my course of instruction ; 
in which the main object was no longer the aids and 
appliances of thought, but the thoughts themselves. 
This conmienced with Logic, in which I began at once 
with the Organon, and read it to the Analytics 

c 



18 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 

inclusive, but profited little by tlie Posterior Ana- 
lytics, which belong to a branch of speculation I 
was not yet ripe for. Contemporaneously with the 
Organon, my father made me read the whole or parts 
of several of the Latin treatises on the scholastic 
logic ; giving each day to him, in our walks, a minute 
account of what I had read, and answering his nu- 
merous and searching questions. After this, I went 
in a similar manner, through the " Computatio sive 
Logica" of Hobbes, a work of a much higher order of 
thought than the books of the school logicians, and 
which he estimated very highly ; in my own opinion 
beyond its merits, great as these are. It was his in- 
variable practice, whatever studies he exacted from 
me, to make me as far as possible understand and 
feel the utility of them : and this he deemed 
peculiarly fitting in the case of the syllogistic logic, 
the usefulness of which had been impugned by so 
many writers of authority. I well remember how, 
and in what particular walk, in the neighbour- 
hood of Bagshot Heath (where we were on a visit 
to his old friend Mr. Wallace, then one of the Mathe- 
matical Professors at Sandhurst) he first attempted 
by questions to make me think on the subject, and 
frame some conception of what constituted the utility 
of the syllogistic logic, and when I had failed in this, to 
make me understand it by explanations. The explana- 
tions did not make the matter at all clear to me at the 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 19 

time ; but tliej were not therefore useless; tliey re- 
mained as a nucleus for my observations and reflections 
to crystallize upon ; tlie import of liis general remarks 
being interpreted to me, by tlie particular instances 
wliicli came under my notice afterwards. My own 
consciousness and experience ultimately led me to 
appreciate quite as liiglily as lie did, the value of an 
early practical familiarity with the school logic. I 
know of nothing, in my education, to which I think 
myself more indebted for whatever capacity of 
thinking I have attained. The first intellectual 
operation in which I arrived at any proficiency, was 
dissecting a bad argument, and finding in what part 
the fallacy lay : and though whatever capacity of 
this sort I attained, was due to the fact that it 
was an intellectual exercise in which I was most 
perseveringly drilled by my father, yet it is also true 
that the school logic, and the mental habits acquired 
in studying it, were among the principal instruments 
of this di'illing. I am persuaded that nothing, in 
modern education, tends so much, when properly 
used, to form exact thinkers, who attach a precise 
meaning to words and propositii.ns, and are not im- 
posed on by vague, loose, or ambiguous terms. The 
boasted influence of mathematical studies is nothing 
to it ; for in mathematical processes, none of the real 
difflculties of correct ratiocina^tion occur. It is also a 
study peculiarly adapted to an early stage in the 

c 2 



20 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION, 

education of philosophical students, since it does not 
presuppose the slow process of acquiring, by experience 
and reflection, valuable thoughts of their own. They 
may become capable of disentangling the intricacies of 
confused and self-contradictory thought, before their 
own thinking fetculties are much advanced ; a power 
which, for want of some such discipline, many other- 
wise able men altogether lack ; and when they have 
to answer opponents, only endeavour, by such argu- 
ments as they can command, to support the opposite 
conclusion, scarcely even attempting to confute the 
reasonings of their antagonists ; and, therefore, at the 
utmost, leaving the question, as far as it depends on 
argument, a balanced one. 

During this time, the Latin and Greek books which 
I continued to read with my father were chiefly such 
as were worth studying, not for the language merely, 
but also for the thoughts. This included much of 
the orators, and especially Demosthenes, some of 
whose principal orations I read several times over, 
and wrote out, by way of exercise, a full analysis ' of 
them. My father's comments on these orations when 
I read them to him were very instructive to me. He 
not only drew my attention to the insight they 
afforded into Athenian institutions, and the principles 
of legislation and government which they often 
illustrated, but pointed out the skill and art of the 
orator — how everything important to his purpose 



CHILDHOOD AND EABLY EDUCATION. 21 

was said at the exact moment when he had brought 
the minds of his audience into the state most fitted 
to receive it ; how he made steal into their minds, 
gradually and by insinuation, thoughts which, if 
expressed in a more direct manner would have roused 
their opposition. Most of these reflections were 
beyond my capacity of full comprehension at the 
time ; but they left seed behind, which germinated in 
due season. At this time I also read the whole of 
Tacitus, Juvenal, and Qumtilian. The latter, owing to 
his obscure style and to the scholastic details of which 
many parts of his treatise are made up, is little read, 
and seldom sufliciently appreciated. His book is a 
kind of encyclopaedia of the thoughts of the ancients 
on the whole field of education and culture ; and I 
have retained through life many valuable ideas which 
I can distinctly trace to my reading of him, even at 
that early age. It was at this period that I read, for 
the first time, some of the most important dialogues 
of Plato, in particular the Gorgias, the Protagoras, 
and the Republic. There is no author to whom my 
father thought himself more indebted for his own 
mental culture, than Plato, or whom he more 
frequently recommended to young students. I can 
bear similar testimony in regard to myself. The 
Socratic method, of which the Platonic dialogues are 
the chief example, is unsurpassed as a disciphne for 
correcting the errors, and clearing up the confusions 



22 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 

incident to the intellectus sihi permissus, tlie under- 
standing which has made up all its bundles of asso- 
ciations under the guidance of ^jopular phraseology. 
The close, searching elenclms by which the man of 
vague generalities is constrained either to express his 
meaning to himself in definite terms, or to confess 
that he does not know what he is talking about ; 
the perpetual testing of all general statements by 
particular instances ; the siege in form which is laid 
to the meaning of large abstract terms, by fixmg 
upon some still larger class-name which includes that 
and more, and dividing down to the thing sought — - 
marking out its limits and definition by a series of 
accurately drawn distinctions between it and each of 
the cognate objects which are successiv€'ly parted off 
from it — all this, as an education for precise thinking, 
is inestimable, and all this, even at that age, took 
such hold of me that it became part of my own mind. 
I have felt ever since that the title of Platonist 
belongs by far better right to those who have been 
nourished in, and have endeavoured to practise 
Plato's mode of investigation, than to those who are 
distinguished only by the adoption of certain 
dogmatical conclusions, drawn mostly from the least 
intelligible of his works, and which the character of 
his mind and writinofs makes it uncertain whether he 
himself regarded as anything more than poetic 
fancies, or philosophic conjectures. 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 23 

In going through Plato and Demosthenes, since I 
could now read these authors, as flir as the language 
was concerned, with perfect ease, I was not required 
to construe them sentence by sentence, but to read 
them aloud to my father, answering questions when 
asked : but the particular attention which he paid to 
elocution (in which his own excellence was remark- 
able) made this reading aloud to him a most painful 
task. Of all things which he required me to do, 
there was none which I did so constantly ill, or in 
which he so perpetually lost his temper with me. 
He had thought much on the princi23les of the art of 
reading, especially the most neglected part of it, the 
inflections of the voice, or modulation as writers on 
elocution call it (in contrast with articulation on the 
one side, and expression on the other) , and had reduced 
it to rules, grounded on the logical analysis of a sen- 
tence. These rules he strongly impressed upon me, 
and took me severely to task for every violation of 
them : but I even then remarked (though I did not 
venture to make the remark to him) that though he 
reproached me when I read a sentence ill, and told 
me how T ought to have read it, he never, by reading- 
it himself, shouted me how it ought to be read. A 
defect running through his otherwise admirable 
modes of instruction, as it did through all his modes 
of thought, was that of trusting too much to the in- 
telligibleness of the abstract, when not embodied in 



24 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 

the concrete. It was at a mucli later period of my 
youth, when practising elocTition by myself, or with 
companions of my own age, that I for the first time 
understood the object of his rules, and saw the 
psychological grounds of them. At that time I and 
others followed out the subject into its ramifications 
and could have composed a very useful treatise, 
grounded on my father's principles. He himself left 
those principles and rules unwritten. I regret that 
when my mind was full of the subject, from sys- 
tematic practice, I did not put them, and our im- 
provements of them, into a formal shape. 

A book which contributed largely to my education, 
in the best sense of the term, was my father's 
History of India. It was published in the begin- 
ning of 1818. During the year previous, while it was 
passing through the press, I used to read the proof 
sheets to him ; or rather, I read the manuscript to 
him while he corrected the proofs. The number of 
new ideas v/hich I received from this remarkable book, 
and the impulse and stimulus a,s well as guidance 
given to my thoughts by its criticisms and disquisi- 
tions on society and civilization in the Hindoo part, 
on institutions and the acts of governments in the 
English part, made my early familiarity with it 
eminently useful to my subsequent progress. And 
though I can perceive deficiencies in it now as com- 
pared with a perfect standard, I still think it, if not 



CHILDHOOD AND EAKLY EDUCATION. 25 

the most, one of tlie most instructive histories ever 
written, and one of the books from which most 
benefit may be derived by a mind in the course of 
making up its opinions. 

The Preface, among the most characteristic of my 
father's writings, as well as the richest in materials of 
thought, gives a picture which may be entirely de- 
pended on, of the sentiments and expectations with 
which he wrote the History. Saturated as the book 
is with the opinions and modes of judgment of a 
democratic radicalism then regarded as extreme ; 
and treating with a severity, at that time most 
unusual, the English Constitution, the English law, 
and all parties and classes who possessed any con- 
siderable influence in the country ; he may have 
expected reputation, but certainly not advancement 
in life, from its publication ; nor could he have sup- 
posed that it would raise up anything but enemies 
for him in powerful quarters : least of all could he 
have expected favour from the East India Company, 
to whose commercial privileges he was unqualifiedly 
hostile, and on the acts of whose government he had 
made so many severe comments : though, in various 
parts of his book, he bore a testimony in their favour, 
which he felt to be their just due, namely, that no 
Government had on the whole given so much proof, 
to the extent of its lights, of good intention towards 
its subjects ; and that if the acts of any other Govern- 



26 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION.; 

ment had tlie light of pubHcity as completely let m 
upon them, they would, hi all probability, still less 
bear scrutiny. 

On learning, however, in the spring of 1819, about 
a year after the publication of the History, that the 
East India Directors desired to strengthen the part 
of their home establishment which was employed in 
carrying on the correspondence with India, my father 
declared himself a candidate for that employment, and, 
to the credit of the Directors, successfully. He was 
appointed one of the Assistants of the Examiner of 
India Correspondence ; officers whose duty it was to 
prepare drafts of despatches to India, for consideration 
by the Directors, in the principal departments of ad- 
ministration. In this office, and in that of Examiner, 
which he subsequently attained, the influence which 
his talents, his reputation, and his decision of cha- 
racter gave him, with saperiors who really desired 
the good government of India, enabled him to a great 
extent to throw into his drafts of desjDatches, and to 
carry through the ordeal of the Court of Directors 
and Board of Control, without having their force 
much weakened, his real opinions on Indian subjects. 
In his History he had set forth, for the first time, 
many of the true principles of Indian adminis- 
tration : and his despatches, following his History, 
did more than had ever been done before to pro- 
mote the improvement of India, and teach Indian 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 27 

officials to "anderstand their business. If a selec- 
tion of them were published, they would, I am 
convinced, place his character as a practical states- 
man fully on a level with his eminence as a specula- 
tive writer. 

This new employment of his time caused no relaxa- 
tion in his attention to my education. It was in this 
same year, 1819, that he took me through a complete 
course of political economy. His loved and intimate, 
friend, Kicardo, had shortly before published the book 
which formed so great an epoch in political economy ; 
a book which never would have been published 
or written, but for the entreaty and strong encourage- 
ment of my father ; for Eicardo, the most modest of 
men, though firmly convinced of the truth of his 
doctrines, deemed himself so little capable of doing 
them justice in exposition and expression, that he 
shrank from the idea of publicity. The same friendly 
encouragement induced Hicardo, a year or two later, 
to become a member of the House of Commons ; 
where, during the few remaining years of his life, un- 
happily cut short in the full vigour of his intellect, he 
rendered so much service to his and my father's opinions 
both on political economy and on other subjects. 

Though Eicardo's great work was already in print, 
no ■ didactic treatise embodying its doctrines, in a 
manner fit for learners, had yet appeared. My father, 
therefore, commenced instructing me in the science 



28 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 

by a sort of lectures, which he delivered to me in 
our walks. He expounded each day a portion of the 
subject, and 1 gave him next day a written account 
of it, which he made me rewrite over and over again 
until it wa.s clear, precise, and tolerably complete. 
In this manner I went through the whole extent of 
the science ; and the written outline of it which re- 
sulted from my daily compte rendu, served him after- 
wards as notes from which to write his Elements of 
Political Economy. After this I read Eicardo, giving 
an account daily of what I read, and discussing, in 
the best manner I could, the collateral points which 
offered themselves in our progress. 

On Money, as the most intricate part of the subject, 
he made me read in the same manner Ricardo's ad- 
mirable pamphlets, written during what was called 
the Bullion controversy ; to these succeeded Adam 
Smith ; and in this reading it was one of my .father's 
main objects to make me apply to Smith's more 
superficial view of political economy, the superior 
lights of*Ricardo, and detect what was fallacious in 
Smith's arguments, or erroneous in any of his conclu- 
sions. Such a mode of instruction was excellently 
calculated to form a thinker ; but it required to be 
worked by a thinker, as close and vigorous as my 
father. The path was a thorny one, even to him, 
and I am sure it was so to me, notwithstanding the 
strong interest I took in the subject. He was often, 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 29 

and mucli beyond reason, proYoked by my failures in 
cases wbere success could not have been expected ; but 
in the main his method Avas right, and it succeeded. 
I do not beheve that any scientific teaching ever was 
more thorough, or better fitted for training the 
faculties, than the mode in Avhich logic and political 
economy were taught to me by my father. Striving, 
even in an exaggerated degree, to call forth the 
actiYity of my faculties, by making me find out 
everything for myself, he gave his explanations not 
before, but after, I had felt the full force of the 
difiiculties ; and not only gave me an accurate 
knowledge of these two great subjects, as far as they 
were then understood, but made me a thinker on 
both. I thought for myself almost from the first, and 
occasionally thought differently from him, though for 
a long time only on minor points, and making his 
opinion the ultimate standard, ilt a later period I even 
occasionally convinced him, and altered liis opinion on 
some points of detail : which I state to his honour, 
not my owm. It at once exemplifies his perfect can- 
dour, and the real worth of his method of teachinor. 

At this point concluded what can properly be 
called my lessons : when I was about fourteen I left 
England for more than a year ; and after my return, 
though my studies went on under my father's general 
direction, he was no longer my schoolmaster. I shall 
therefore pause here, and turn back to matters of a 



r 



30 CHILDHOOD AND EAl^LY EDUCATION". 

more general nature connected with the part of my 
life and education included in the preceding reminis- 
cences. 

In the course of instruction which I have par- 
tially retraced, the point most superficially ap- 
parent is the great effort to give, during the years 
of childhood an amount of knowledge in what are 
considered the higher branches of education, which is 
seldom acquired (if acquired at all) until the age of 
manhood. The result of the experiment shows the 
ease with which this may be done, and places in a 
strong light the wretched waste of so many precious 
years as are spent in acquiring the modicum of Latin 
and Greek commonly taught to schoolboys ; a waste 
which has led so many educational reformers to 
entertain the ill-judged proposal of discarding these 
languages altogether from general education. If I 
had been by nature extremely quick of apprehension, 
or had possessed a very accurate and retentive 
memory, or were of a remarkably active and energetic 
character, the trial would not be conclusive ; but in all 
these natural gi fts I am rather below than above par ; 
what I could do, could assuredly be done by any 
boy or girl of average capacity and healthy 23hysical 
constitution : and if I have accomplished anything, I 
owe it, among other fortunate circumstances, to the 
fact that through the early training bestowed on me 
by my father, I started, I may fairly say, with an 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 31 

advantage of a quarter of a century over my con- 
temporaries. 

There was one cardinal point in tliis training, of 
wliich I have already given some indication, and 
which, more than anything else, was the cause 
of wliatever good it effected. Most boys or youths 
who have had much knowledge drilled into them, 
have their mental capacities not strengthened, 
but overlaid by it. They are crammed with mere 
facts, and with the opinions or phrases of other 
people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the 
power to form opinions of their own : and thus the 
sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in 
their education, so often grow up mere parroters of 
what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds 
except in the furrows traced for them. Mine, how- 
ever, was not an education of cram. My father 
never permitted anything which I learnt to de- 
generate into a mere exercise of memory. He strove 
to make the understanding not only go along with 
every step of the teaching, but, if possible, precede it. 
Anything which could be found out by thinking I 
never was told, until I had exhausted my efforts to 
find it out for myself As far as I can trust my 
remembrance, I acquitted myself very lamely in this 
department ; my recollection of such matters is 
almost wholly of failures, hardly ever of success. It. 
is true the failures were often in thino-s in which 



32 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATI02T. 

success in so earlj a stage of my progress, was 
almost impossible. I remember at some time in my 
thirteenth year, on my happening to use the word 
idea, he asked me what an idea was ; and expressed 
some displeasure at my ineffectual efforts to define 
the word : I recollect also his indignation at my 
using the common expression that something was 
true in theory but required correction in practice ; 
and how, after making me vainly strive to define the 
word theory, he explained its meaning, and showed 
the fallacy of the vulgar form of speech which I had 
used ; leaving me fully persuaded that in being 
unable to give a correct definition of Theory, and in 
speaking of it as something which might be at 
variance with practice, I had shown unparalleled 
ignorance. In this he seems, and perhaps was, very 
unreasonable ; but I think, only in being angry at 
my failure. A pupil from whom nothing is ever 
demanded which he cannot do, never does all he can. 
One of the evils most liable to attend on any sort 
of early proficiency, and which often fatally blights 
its promise, my fiither most anxiously guarded 
against. This was self-conceit. He kept me, with 
extreme vigilance, out of the way of hearing myself 
praised, or of being led to make self-flattering com- 
parisons between myself and others. From his own 
intercourse with me I could derive none but a very 
Immble opinion of myself; and tlie standard of com- 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 33 

parison lie always held up to me, was not wliat otlier 
people did, but what a man could and ouglit to do. 
He completely succeeded in preserving mo from the 
sort of influences he so much dreaded. T was not at 
all aware that my attainments were anything un- 
usual at my age. If I accidentally had my attention 
drawn to the fact that some other boy knew less 
than myself — which happened less often than might 
be imagined — I concluded, not that I knew much, but 
that he, for some reason or other, knew little, or that 
his knowledge was of a different kind from mine. 
My state of mind was not humility, but neither was 
it arrogance. I never thought of saying to myself, 
I am, or I can do, so and so. I neither estimated 
myself highly nor lowly : I did not estimate myself 
at all. If I thought anything about myself, it 
was that I was rather backward in my studies, 
since I always found myself so, in comparison 
with what my father expected from me. I assert 
this with confidence, though it was not the impression 
of various persons who saw me in my childhood. 
They, as I have since found, thought me gTeatly 
and disagreeably self-conceited ; probably because 
I was disputatious, and did not scruple to give 
direct contradictions to things which I heard said. 
I suppose I acquired this bad habit from having 
been encourao;ed in an unusual deoTee to talk on 
matters beyond my age, and with grown persons, 

D 



34 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION 

while I never had inculcated on me the usual respect 
for them. My father did not correct this ill-breeding 
and impertinence, probably from not being aware of 
it, for I was always too much in awe of him to be 
otherwise than extremely subdued and quiet in his 
presence. Yet with all this I had no notion of any 
superiority in myself; and well was it for me that I 
had not. I remember the very place in Hyde Park 
where, in my fourteenth year, on the eve of leaving 
my father's house for a long absence, he told me that 
I should find, as I got acquainted v/ith new people, 
that I had been taught many things which youths of 
my age did not commonly know ; and that many 
persons would be disposed to talk to me of this, and 
to compliment me upon it. What other things he 
said on this topic I remember very imperfectly ; but 
he wound up by saying, that whatever I knew more 
than others, could not be ascribed to any merit in 
me, but to the very unusual advantage wliich had 
fallen to my lot, of having a father who was able 
to teach me, and willing to give the necessa.ry trouble 
and time ; that it was no matter of 23raise to me, if I 
knew more than those who had not had a similar ad- 
vantage, but the deepest disgrace to me if I did not. I 
have a distinct remembrance, that the suggestion thus 
for the first time made to me, that I knew more than 
other youths who were considered well educated, was 
to me a piece of information, to which, as to all other 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 35 

tilings wliich my fatlier told me, I gave implicit 
credence, but which did not at all impress me as a 
personal matter. I felt no disposition to glority 
myself upon the circumstance that there were other 
persons who did not know what I knew ; nor had I 
ever flattered myself that my acquirements, whatever 
they might be, were any merit of mine : but, now 
when my attention was called to the subject, I felt 
that what my father had said respecting my peculiar 
advantages was exactly the truth and common sense 
of the matter, and it fixed my opinion and feeling 
from that time forward. 

It is evident that this, among many other of the pur- 
poses of my father's scheme of education, could not 
have been accomplished if he had not carefully kept 
me from having any great amount of intercourse with 
other boys. He was earnestly bent upon my escaping 
not only the corrupting influence which boys exercise 
over boys, but the contagion of vulgar modes of 
thought and feeling ; and for this he was willing 
that I should pay the price of inferiority in the 
accomplishments which schoolboys in all countries 
chiefly cultivate. The deficiencies in my education 
were principally in the things which boys learn from 
being turned out to shift for themselves, and from 
being brought together in large numbers. From 
temperance and much walking, I grew up healthy 
and hardy, though not muscular ; but I could do no 

D 2 



36 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 

feats of skill or pliysical strength, and knew none of 
tlie ordinary bodily exercises. It was not that play, 
or time for it, was refused me. Though no holidays 
were allowedj lest the habit of work should be 
broken, and a taste for idleness acquired, I had ample 
leisure in eveiy day to amuse myself; but as I had 
no boy companions, and the animal need of physical 
activity was satisfied by walking, my amusements, 
which were m^ostly solitary, were in general, of a quiet, 
if not a bookish turn, and gave little stimulus to any 
other kind even of mental activity than that which was 
already called forth by my studies : I consequently 
remained long, and in a less degree have always 
remained, inexpert in anything requiring manual 
dexterity ; my mind, as well as my hands, did its 
work very lamely when it was applied, or ought to 
have been applied, to the practical details which, as 
they are the chief interest of life to the majority of 
men, are also the things in which whatever mental 
capacity they have, chiefly shows itself: I was 
constantly meriting reproof by inattention, inobser- 
vance, and general slackness of mind in matters of 
daily life. My father was the extreme opposite in 
these particulars : his senses and mental faculties 
were always on the alert ; he carried decision and 
energy of character in his wliole manner and into 
every action of life : and this, as much as his talents, 
contributed to the strong impression which he always 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 37 

made ujion tliose witli whom lie came into personal 
contact. But the children of energetic parents, fre- 
quently grow np unenergetic, because they lean on 
their parents, and the parents are energetic for them. 
The education which my father gave me, was in 
itself much more fitted for training me to know than 
to do. Not that he was unaware of my deficiencies ; 
both as a boy and as a youth I was incessantly 
smarting under his severe admonitions on, the 
subject. There was anything but insensibiHty or 
tolerance on his part towards such shortcomings : 
but, while he saved me from the demoralizing effects 
of school life, he made no effort to provide me with 
any sufficient substitute for its practicalizing in- 
fluences. Whatever qualities he himself, probably, 
had acquired without difficulty or special training, 
he seems to have supposed that I ought to acquire 
as easily. He had not, I think, bestowed the same 
amount of thought and attention on this, as on most 
other branches of education ; and here, as well in 
some other points of my tuition, he seems ,to have 
expected effects without causes. 



CHAPTEPi 11. 



MORAL INFLUENCES IN EAELY YOUTH. MY FATHERS 
CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 

TN my education, as in that of everyone, the moral 
influences, which are so much more important 
than all others, are also the most complicated, and the 
most difficult to specify with any approach to com- 
pleteness. Without attempting the hopeless task of 
detailing the circumstances by which, in this respect, 
my early character may have been shaped, I shall 
confine myself to a few leading points, which form an 
indispensable part of any true account of my educa- 
tion. 

I was brought up from the first without any re- 
ligious belief, in the ordinary acceptation of the term. 
My father, educated in the creed of Scotch Pres- 
])yterianism, had by his own studies and reflections 
been early led to reject not only the belief in Reve- 
lation, but the foundations of what is commonly called 
Natural Peligion. I have heard him say, that the 
turning point of his mind on the subject was reading 
Butler's Analogy. That work, of which he always 
continued to speak with respect, kept him, as lie 



MOEAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY YOUTH. 89 

said, for some considerable time, a believer in the 
divine authority of Christianity ; by proving to him, 
that whatever are the difficulties in believing that 
the Old and New Testaments proceed from, or record 
the acts of, a perfectly wise and good being, the same 
and still greater difficulties stand in the way of the 
belief, that a being of such a character can have been 
the Maker of the universe. He considered Butler's 
argument as conclusive against the only opponents 
for whom it was intended. Those who admit an 
omnipotent as well as perfectly just and benevolent 
maker and ruler of such a world as this, can say 
little against Christianity but what can, with at least 
equal force, be retorted against themselves. Finding, 
therefore, no halting place in Deism, he remained in 
a state of perplexity, until, doubtless after many 
struggles, he yielded to the conviction, that, concern- 
ing the origin of things nothing whatever can be 
known. This is the only correct statement of his 
opinion ; for dogmatic atheism he looked upon as 
absurd ; as most of those, whom the world has con- 
sidered Atheists, have always done. Thase parti- 
culars are important, because they show that my 
father's rejection of all that is called religious belief, 
was not, as many might suppose, primarily a matter 
of logic and evidence : the grounds of it were moral, 
still more than intellectual. He found it impossible 
to believe that a world so full of evil was the wuik 



40 MORAL INFLUENCES IN EABLY YOUTH. 

of an Author combining infinite power with perfect 
goodness and righteousness. His intellect spurned 
the subtleties by which men attempt to blind them- 
selves to this open contradiction. The Sabsean, or 
Manichaean theory of a Good and an Evil Piinciple, 
struggling against each other for the government of 
the universe, he would not have equally condemned ; 
and I have heard him express surprise, that no one 
revived it in our time. He would have regarded it 
as a mere hypothesis ; but he would have ascribed to 
it no depraving influence. As it was, his aversion 
to religion, in the sense usually attached to the term, 
was of the same kind with that of Lucretius : he 
regarded it with the feelings due not to a mere 
mental delusion, but to a great moral evil. He 
looked upon it as the greatest enemy of morality : 
first, by setting up fictitious excellences, — belief in 
creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not con- 
nected with the good of human-kind, — and causing 
these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine 
virtues : but above all, by radically vitiating the 
standard of morals ; making it consist in doing the 
will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all tlie 
phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it 
depicts as eminently hateful. I liave a hundred 
times heard him say, that all ages and nations 
have represented their gods as wicked, in a ccn- 
stantly increasing progression, that mankind have 



MOHAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY YOUTH. 41 

gone on adding trait after trait till tliey readied the 
most perfect conception of wickedness which the 
human mind can devise, and have called this God, 
and prostrated themselves before it. This ne plus 
ultra of wickedness he considered to be embodied in 
what is commonly presented to mankind as the 
creed of Christianity. Think (he used to say) of a 
beino' who would make a Hell — who would create 

o 

the human race with the infallible foreknowledge, 
and therefore with the intention, that the great 
majority of them were to be consigned to horrible 
and everlasting torment. The time, I believe, is 
drawing near when this dreadful conception of an 
object of worship will be no longer identified with 
Christianity ; and when all persons, with any sense 
of moral good and evil, vdll look upon it with 
the same indignation with which my father regarded 
it. My father was as well aware as any one that 
Christians do not, in general, undergo the demora- 
lizing consequences which seem inherent in such a 
creed, in the manner or to the extent which might 
have been expected from it. The same slovenliness 
of thought, aTid subjection of the reason to fears, 
wishes, and affections, which enable them to accept a 
theory involving a contradiction in terms, prevents 
them from perceiving the logical consequences of the 
theory. Such is the facility with which mankind 
believe at one and the same time things inconsistent 



42 MOEAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY YOUTH. 

with one another, and so few are those who draw 
from what they receive as truths, any consequences 
but those recommended to them by their feehngs, 
that multitudes have held the undoubting belief in 
an Omnipotent Author of Hell, and have nevertheless 
identified that being with the best conception they 
were able to form of perfect goodness. Their worship 
was not paid to the demon which such a Being as 
they Imagined would really be, but to their own ideal 
of axcellence. The evil is, that such a belief keeps 
the ideal wretchedly low ; and opposes the most 
obstinate resistance to all thought which has a 
tendency to raise it higher. Believers shrink from 
every train of ideas which would lead the mind to a 
clear conception and an elevated standard of ex- 
cellence, because they feel (even Avhen they, do not 
distinctly see) that such a standard would conflict 
with many of the dispensations of nature, and with 
much of what they are accustomed to consider as the 
Christian creed. And thus morality continues a 
matter of blind tradition, with no consistent principle, 
nor even any consistent feeling, to guide it. 

It would have been wholly inconsistent with my 
father's ideas of duty, to allow me to acquire im- 
pressions contrary to his convictions and feelings 
respecting religion : and he impressed upon me from 
the first, that the manner in which the world came 
into existence was a subject on which nothing was 



MORAL INFLUENCES IN .EAULY YOUTH. 43 

known : that the question, " Who made me ?" cannot 
be answered, because we have no experience or 
authentic information from which to answer it ; and 
that any answer only throws the difficulty a step 
further back, since the question immediately presents 
itself, " Who made God T He, at the same time, took 
care that I should be acquainted with what had been 
thought by mankind on these impenetrable problems. 
I have mentioned at how early an age he made me a 
reader of ecclesiastical history ; and he taught me to 
take the strongest interest in the Reformation, as the 
great and decisive contest against priestly tyranny for 
liberty of thought. 

I am thus one of the very few examples, in this 
country, of one who has, not thrown off religious 
belief, but never had it : I grew up in a negative 
state with regard to it. I looked upon the modern 
exactly as I did upon the ancient religion, as some- 
thing which in no way concerned me. It did not 
seem to me more strange that English people should 
beheve what I did not, than that the men I read of 
in Herodotus should have done so. History had 
made the variety of opinions among mankind a fact 
familiar to me, and this was but a prolongation of 
that fact. This point in my early education had, 
however, incidentally one bad consequence deserving- 
notice. In giving me an opinion contrary to that of 
the world, my father thought it necessary to give it 



44 MOEAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY YOUTH. 

as one wMch could not prudently be avowed to the 
world. TMs lesson of keeping my thoughts to 
myself, at that early age, was attended with some 
moral disadvantages ; though my limited intercourse 
wdth strangers, especially such as were likely to speak 
to me on religion, prevented me from being placed in 
the alternative of avowal or hypocrisy. I remember 
two occasions in my boyhood, on which I felt myself 
in this alternative, and in both cases I avowed my 
disbelief and defended it. My opponents were boys, 
considerably older than myself: one of them I 
certainly staggered at the time, but the subject w^as 
never renewed between us : the other who was sur- 
prised and somewhat shocked, did his best to 
convince me for some time, without effect. 

The great advance in liberty of discussion, which 
is one of the most important differences between the 
present time and that of my childhood, has greatly 
a^ltered the moralities of this question ; and I think 
that few men of my father's intellect and public spirit, 
holding with such intensity of moral conviction as he 
did, unpopular opinions on religion, or on any other 
of the great subjects of thought, would now either 
practise or inculcate • the withholding of them from 
the world, unless in the cases, becoming fewer every 
day, in Vvdiich frankness on these subjects would 
either risk the loss of means of subsistence, or would 
amount to exclusion from some sphere of usefulness 



MOEAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY YOUTH. 45 

peculiarly suitable to the capacities of the individual. 
On religion in particular the time appears to me to 
have come, when it is the duty of all who being 
qualified in point of knowledge, have on mature con- 
sideration satisfied themselves that the current 
opinions are not only false but hurtful, to make their 
dissent known ; at least, if they are among those 
whose station or reputation, gives their opinion a 
chance of being attended to. Such an avowal would 
put an end, at once and for ever, to the vulgar 
prejudice, that what is called, very improperly, 
unbelief, is connected with any bad qualities either 
of mind or heart. The world would be astonished if 
it knew how great a proportion of its brightest orna- 
ments — of those most distinguished even in popular 
estimation for wisdom and virtue^are complete 
sceptics in religion ; many of them refraining from 
avowal, less from personal considerations, than from 
a conscientious, though now in my opinion a most 
mistaken apprehension, lest by speaking out what 
would tend to weaken existing beliefs, and by con- 
sequence (as they suppose) existing restraints, they 
should do harm instead of good. 

Of unbelievers (so called) as well as of believers, 
there are many species, including almost every variety 
of moral type. But the best among them, as no one 
who has had opportunities of really knowing them 
Will hesitate to affirm, are more genuinely religious, 



46 MY father's character and opinions. 

in the best sense of the word religion, than those 
who exclusively arrogate to themselves the title. 
The liberality of the age, or in other words the 
weakening of the obstinate prejudice which makes 
men unable to see what is before their eyes because 
it is contrary to their expectations, has ca.used it to be 
very commonly admitted that a Deist may be 
truly religious : but if religion stands for any graces 
of character and not for mere dogma, the assertion 
may equally be made of many whose belief is far 
short of Deism. Though they may think the proof 
incomplete that the universe is a work of design, 
and though they assuredly disbelieve that it can 
have an Author and Governor who is absolute in power 
as well as perfect in goodness, they have that which 
constitutes the principal worth of all religions what- 
ever, an ideal conception of a Perfect Being, to which 
they habitually refer as the guide of their conscience * 
and this ideal of Good is usually far nearer to perfec- 
tion than the objective Deity of those, who think 
themselves obliged to find absolute goodness in the 
a-uthor of a world so crowded with suffering and 
so deformed by injustice as ours. 

My Cither's moral convictions, wholly dissevered 
from religion, were very much of the character of 
those of the Greek philosophers ; and were delivered 
with the force aiid decision which characterized all 
that came from him. Even at the very early age at 



MY FATHEE's character AND OPINIONS. 47 

wliic3li I read with him the Memorabiha of Xeii023hon, 
I imbibed from that work and from his comments a 
deep respect for the character of Socrates ; who stood 
in my mind as a model of ideal excellence : and I 
well remember how mj father at that time impressed 
upon me the lesson of the '' Choice of Hercules." 
At a somewhat later period the lofty moral standard 
exhibited in the writings of Plato operated upon me 
with great force. My father's moral inculcations 
were at all times mainly those of the " Socratici 
viri ;" justice, temperance (to which he gave a very 
extended application), veracity, perseverance, readiness 
to encounter pain and especially labour ; regard for 
the public good ; estimation of persons according to 
their merits, and of things according to their intrinsic 
usefulness ; a life of exertion in contradiction to one 
of self-indulgent ease and sloth. These and other 
moralities he conveyed in brief sentences, uttered as 
occasion arose, of grave exhortation, or stern repro- 
bation and contempt. 

But thouo'h direct moral teachino- does much, in- 
direct does more ; and the effect my father produced 
on my character, did not depend solely on what he 
said or did with that direct object, but also, and still 
more, on wliat manner of man. he was. 

In his views of life he partook of the character of 
the Stoic, the Epicurean, and the Cynic, not in the 
modern but the ancient sense of the word. In his 



48 MY father's character and opinioxs. 

personal qualities the Stoic predominated. His 
standard of morals was Epicurean, inasmuch as it 
was utilitarian, taking as the exclusive test of right 
and wrong, the tendency of actions to produce pleasure 
or pain. But he had (and this was the Cynic 
element) scarcely any belief in pleasure ; at least in 
his later years, of which alone, on this point, I can 
speak confidently. He was not insensible to pleasures ; 
but he deemed very few of them worth the price 
which, at least in the present state of society, must be 
paid for them. The greater number of miscarriages 
in hfe, he considered to be attributable to the over- 
valuing of pleasures. Accordingly, temperance, in 
the large sense intended by the Greek philosophers — 
stopping short at the point of moderation in all 
indulgences — was with him, as with them, almost 
the central point of educational precept. His incul- 
cations of this virtue fill a large place in my childish 
remembrances. He thought human life a poor thing 
at best, after the freshness of youth and of unsatisfied 
curiosity had gone by. This was a topic on which 
he did not often speak, especially, it may be supposed, 
in the presence of young persons : but when he did, 
it was with an air of settled and profound conviction. 
He would sometimes say, that if life were made what 
it might be, by good government and good education, it 
would be worth having : but he never spoke with any- 
tliing like enthusiasm even of that possibility. He 



MY FATHEH'S CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 49 

never varied in rating intellectual enjoyments above 
all others, even in value as pleasures, independently of 
their ulterior benefits. The pleasures of the benevolent 
affections he placed high in the scale ; and used to 
say, that he had never known a happy old man, 
except those who were able to live over again in the 
pleasures of the young. For passionate emotions of 
all sorts, and for everything which has been said or 
written in exaltation of them, he professed the 
greatest contempt. He regarded them as a form of 
madness. " The intense" was with him a bye- word 
of scornful disapprobation. He regarded as an 
aberration of the moral standard of modern times, 
compared with that of the ancients, the great stress 
laid upon feeling. Feelings, as such, he considered 
to be no proper subjects of praise or blame. Eight 
and wrong, good and bad, he regarded as qualities - 
solely of conduct — of acts and omissions ; tliere being 
no feeling which may not lead, and does not fre- 
quently lead, either to good or to bad actions : 
conscience itself, the very desire to act right, often 
leading jDOople to act wrong. Consistently carrying 
out the doctrine, that the object of praise and blame 
should be the discouragement of wrong conduct and 
the encourao'ement of rio;ht, he refused to let his 
praise or blame be influenced by the motive of the 
agent. He bhmied as severely what he thought a 
bad action, when tlie motive was a feeling of duty, 

E 



50 MY FATHERS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS, 

as if the agents had been consciously evil doers. TTo 
would not have accepted as a plea in mitigation for 
inquisitors, that they sincerely believed burning 
heretics to be an obligation of conscience. But 
though he did not allow honesty of purpose to soften 
his disapprobation of actions, it had its full effect on 
his estimation of characters. No one prized con- 
scientiousness and rectitude of intention more highly, 
or was more incapable of valuing any person in 
whom he did not feel assurance of it. But he 
disliked people quite as much for any other 
deficiency, provided he thought it equally likely to 
make them act ill. He disliked, for instance, a 
fanatic in any bad cause, as much or more than one 
who adopted the same cause from self-interest, 
because he thought him even more likely to be 
practically mischievous. And thus, his aversion to 
many intellectual errors, or what lie regarded as 
such, partook, in a certain sense, of the character of a 
moral feeling. All this is merely saying that he, in 
a degree once common, but now very unusual, threw 
his feelings into his opinions ; which truly it is 
difficult to understand hoAV any one who possesses 
much of both, can fail to do. None but those 
who do not care about opinions, will confound 
this with intolerance. Those, who having opinions 
which they hold to be immensely important, and 
their contraries to be prodigiously hurtful, have 



MY FATHERS CHARACTER AND OriNIONS. 51 

any deep regard for the general good, will necessarily 
dislike, as a class and in the abstract, tliose who 
think WTong what they think right, and right what 
they think wrong : though they need not therefore 
be, nor was my father, insensible to good qualities in 
an opponent, nor governed in their estimation of 
individuals by one general presumption, instead oi 
by the whole of their character. I grant that an 
earnest person, being no more infallible than other 
men, is liable to dislike people on account of opinions 
which do not merit dislike ; but if he neither himself 
does them any ill office, nor connives at its being 
done by others, he is not intolerant : and the for- 
bearance which flows from a conscientious sense of 
the importa^nce to mankind of the equal freedom of 
all opinions, is the only tolerance which is com- 
mendable, or, to the highest moral order of minds, 
possible. 

It will be admitted, that a man of the opinions, 
and the character, above described, was likely to 
leave a strong niv'ral impression on any mind 
principa,lly formed by him, and that his moral 
teaching was not likely to err on the side of laxity 
or indulgence. The element which was chiefly 
deficient in his moral relation to his children was 
that of tenclerness. I do not believe that this 
daficieucy lay in his ov/n nature. I believe him to 
have had much more feeling than he habitually 

E 2 



52 MY fathee's character and opinions. 

showed, and mucli greater capacities of feeling than 
were ever developed. He resembled most English- 
men in being ashamed of the signs of feeling, and by 
the absence of demonstration, starving the feelings 
themselves. If we consider further that he was in 
the trying position of sole teacher, and add to this 
that his temper was constitutionally irritable, it is 
impossible not to feel true pity for a father who did, 
and strove to do, so much for his children, who would 
have so valued their affection, yet who must have 
been constantly feeling that fear of him was drying 
it up at its source. This was no longer the case 
later in life, and with his younger children. They 
loved him tenderly : and if I cannot say so much of 
myself, I w^as always loyally devoted to him. As 
regards my own education, I hesitate to pronounce 
whether I was more a loser or gainer by his 
severity. It was not such as tq prevent me from 
having a happy childhood. And I do not believe 
that boys can be induced to apply themselves with 
vigour, and what is so much more difficult, perseve- 
rance, to dry and irksome studies, by the sole force 
of persuasion and soft words. Much must be done, 
and much must be learnt, by children, for which rigid 
discipline, and known liability to punishment, are 
indispensable as means. It is, no doubt, a very 
laudable effort, in modern teaching, to render as 
much as possible of what the young are required to 






MY father's character AND OPINIONS. 53 

learn, easy and interesting to tliem. But when this 
principle is pushed to the length of not requiring 
them to learn anything but what has been made easy 
and interesting, one of the chief objects of education 
is sacrificed. I rejoice in the decline of the old 
brutal and tyrannical system of teaching, which, 
however, did succeed in enforcing habits of applica- 
tion ; but the new, as it seems to me, is training up 
a race of men who will be incapable of doing any- 
thing which is disagreeable to them. I do not, then, 
believe that fear, as an element in education, can be 
dispensed with ; but I am sure that it ought not to 
be the main element ; and when it predominates so 
much as to preclude love and confidence on the part 
of the child to those who should be the unreservedly 
trusted advisers of after years, and perhaps to seal 
up the fountains of frank and spontaneous communi- 
cativeness in the child's nature, it is an evil for which 
a large abatement must be made from the benefits, 
moral and intellectual, which may flow from any 
other part of the education. 

During this first period of my life, the habitual 
frequenters of my father's house were limited to a 
very few persons, most of them little known to the 
world, but whom personal worth, and more or less of 
congeniality with at least his political opinions (not . 
so frequently to be met with then as since) inclined 
him to cultivate ; and his conversations with them I 



54 MY FATPIEPJs CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 

listened to with interest and instruction. My being 
an liabitual inmate of my fatiier's study made me 
acquainted with the dearest of his friends, David 
liicardo, who by his benevolent countenance, and 
kindliness of manner, was very attractive to young- 
persons, and who after I. became a student of 
political economy, invited me to his house and to 
walk with him in order to converse on the subject. 
I was a more frequent visitor (from about 1817 or 
1818) to Mr. Hume, who, born in the same part of 
Scotland as my father, and having been, I rather 
think, a younger schoolfellow or college companion of 
his, had on returning from India renewed their youth- 
ful acquaintance, and who coming like many others 
greatly under the influence of my father's intellect 
and energy of character, was induced partly by that 
influence to go into Parliament, and there adopt the 
line of conduct which has given him an honourable 
place in the history of his country. Of Mr. Bentham 
I saw much more, owing to the close intimacy which 
existed between him and my father. I do not know 
how soon after my father's first arrival in England 
they became acquainted. But my father was the 
earliest Englishman of any great mark, who 
thoroughly understood, and in the main adopted, 
Bentham 's general views of ethics, government and 
law : and this was a natural foundation for sympathy 
between them, and made them familiar companions 



J 



MY father's character AND OPINIOXS. 55 

in a period of Bentliam's life during which he ad- 
mitted much fewer visitors than was the case 
subsequently. At this time Mr. Bentham passed 
some part of every year at Barrow Green House, ii 
a beautiful part of the Surrey Hills, a few miles froi. 
Godstone, and there I each summer accompanied my 
father in a long visit. In 1813 Mr. Bentha^m, my 
father, and I made an excursion, which included 
Oxford, Bath and Bristol, Exeter, Plymouth, and 
Portsmouth. In this journey I saw many things 
which were instructive to me, and acquired my first 
taste for natural scenery, in the elementary form of 
fondness for a " view." In the succeeding winter we 
moved into a house very near Mr. Bentham's, which 
my father rented from him, in Queen Square, 
Westminster. From 1814 to 1817 Mr. Bentham lived 
during half of each year at Ford Abbey, in Somerset- 
shire (or rather in a part of Devonshire surrounded 
by Somersetshire), which intervals I had the advantage 
of passing at that place. This sojourn was, I think, 
an important circumstance in my education. Nothing 
contributes more to nourish elevation of sentiments 
in a people, than the large and free character of their 
habitations. The middle-age architecture, the baronial 
hall, and the spacious and lofty rooms, of this fine old 
place, so imlike the mean and cramped externals o^ 
English middle class life, gave the sentiment of a 
larger and freer existence, and were to me n. sfut of 



56 MY FATHEH'S CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 

poetic cultivation, aided also by the cliaracter of tlie 
grounds in which the Abbey stood ; which were riant 
and secluded, umbrageous, and full of the sound of 
falling waters. 

I owed another of the fortunate circumstances in 
my education, a year's residence in France, to Mr. 
Bentham's brother, General Sir Samuel Bentham. I 
had seen Sir Samuel Bentham and his family at their 
house near Gosport in the course of the tour already 
mentioned (he being then Superintendent of the 
Dockyard at Portsmouth), and during a stay of a few 
days which they made at Ford Abbey shortly after 
the peace, before going to live on the Continent. In 
1820 they invited me for a six months' visit to them 
in the South of France, which their kindness 
ultimately prolonged to nearly a twelvemonth. Sir 
Samuel Bentham, though of a character of mind 
different from that of his illustrious brother, was a 
man of very considerable attainments and general 
powers, with a decided genius for mechanical art. 
His wife, a daughter of the celebrated chemist. Dr. 
Fordyce, was a woman of strong will and decided 
character, much general knowledge, and great prac- 
tical good sense of the Edgeworth kind : she was the 
ruling spirit of the household, as she deserved, and 
was well qualified, to be. Their family consisted of one 
son (the eminent botanist) and three daughters, the 
youngest about two years my senior. I am indebted 



MY father's CPIARACTER AND OPINIONS. 57 

to them for inucli and various instruction, and for an 
almost parental interest in mj welfare. When I first 
joined them, in May 1820, they occupied the Chateau 
of Pompignan (still belonging to a descendant of 
Voltaire's enemy) on the heights overlooking the 
plain of the Garonne between Montaubcin and 
Toulouse. I accompanied them in an excursion to 
the Pyrenees, including a stay of some duration at 
Bagneres de Bigorre, a journey to Pau, Bayonne, and. 
Bagneres de Luchon, and an ascent of the Pic du 
Midi de Bigorre. 

This first introduction to the highest order of 
^mountain scenery made the deepest impression on 
me, and gave a colour to my tastes through dife. 
In October we proceeded by the beautiful mountain 
route of Castres and St. Pons, from Toulouse to Mont- 
pellier, in which last neighbourhood Sir Samuel had 
just bought the estate of Bestincliere, near the foot 
of the singular mountain of St. Loup. During this 
residence in France I acquired a familiar knowledge 
of the French language, and acquaintance with the 
ordinary French literature ; I took lessons in 
various bodily exercises, in none of which however I 
made any proficiency ; and at Montpellier I attended 
the excellent winter courses of lectures at the Faculte 
des Sciences, those of M. Angiada on chemistry, 
of M. Provencal on zoology, and of a very ac- 
,complished representative of the eighteenth century 



58 MY father's chaeacter and oriNioxs. 

metaphysics, M. Gergonne, on logic, under the name 
of Philosophy of the Sciences. I also went through a 
course of the higher mathematics under the private 
tuition of M. Lentheric, a professor at the Lycee of 
Montpellier. But the greatest, perhaps, of the many 
advantages which I owed to this episode in my 
education, was that of having breathed for a whole 
year, the free and genial atmosphere of Continental 
life. This advantage was not the less real though 
I could not then estimate, nor even consciously 
feel it. Having so little experience of English life, 
and the few people I knew being mostly such as had 
public objects, of a large and personally disinterested 
kind, at heart, I was ignorant of the low moral tone of 
what, in England, is called society ; the habit of, not 
indeed professing, but taking for granted in every mode 
of implication, that conduct is of course always directed 
towards low and petty objects ; the absence of high 
feelings which manifests itself by sneering deprecia- 
tion of all demonstrations of them, and by general 
abstinence (except among a few of the stricter re- 
ligionists) from professing any high principles of action 
at all, except in those preordained cases in which such 
profession is put on as part of the costume and for- 
malities of the occasion. I could not then know 
or estimate the difference between this manner of 
existence, and that of a people like the French, whose 
faults, if equally real, are at all events different ; 



MY father's character AND OPINIONS. 59 

among whom sentiments, which by comparison at 
least may be called elevated, are the current coin of 
human intercourse, both in books and in private life ; 
and though often evaporating in profession, are yet 
kept alive in the nation at large by constant exercise, 
and stimulated by sympathy, so as to form a living 
and active part of the existence of great mimbers of 
persons, and to be recognised and understood by all. 
Neither could I then appreciate the general culture of 
the understanding, which results from the habitual 
exercise of the feelings, and is thus carried down into 
the most uneducated classes of several countries on 
the Continent, in a degree not equalled in England 
among the so-called educated, except where an 
unusual tenderness of conscience leads to a habitual 
exercise of the intellect on questions of right and 
wrong. I did not know the way in which, among the 
ordinary English, the absence of interest in things of 
an unselfish kind, except occasionally in a special 
thing here and there, and the habit of not speaking 
to others, nor much even to themselves, about the 
things in which they do feel interest, causes both their 
feelings and their intellectual faculties to remain unde- ^ 
veloped, or to develope themselves only in some single 
a.nd very limited direction ; reducing them, considered 
as spiritual beings, to a kind of negative existence. 
All these things I did not perceive till long after- 
wards ; but I even then felt, though without stating 



GO MY FATHER'S CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 

it clearly to myself, tbe contrast between tlie frank 
sociability and amiability of French personal inter- 
course, and tlie English mode of existence in which 
everybody acts as if everybody else (with few, or 
no exceptions) was either an enemy or a bore. In 
France, it is true, the bad as well as the good 
points, both of individual and of national character, 
come more to the surface, and break out more fear- 
lessly in ordinary intercourse, than in England : but 
the general habit of the people is to show, as well as 
to expect, friendly feeling in every one towards every 
other, wherever there is not some positive cause for 
the opposite. In England it is only of the best bred 
people, in the upper or upper middle ranks, that 
anything like this can be said. 

In my way through Paris, both going and return- 
ing, I passed some time in the house of M. Say, the 
eminent political economist, who was a friend and 
correspcnient of my father, having become ac- 
quainted with him on a visit to England a year or 
tAvo after the peace. He was a man of the later 
period of the French Revolution, a fine specimen of 
the best kind of French Republican, one of those who 
had never bent the knee to Bonaparte though 
courted by him to do so ; a truly upright, brave, and 
enlightened man. He lived a quiet and studious 
life, made happy by warm affections, public and 
private. He was acquainted with many of the 



MY father's character a:nd opinions. 61 

chiefs of the Liberal party, and I saw various note- 
worthy persons while staying at his house ; among 
whom I have pleasure in the recollection of having 
once seen Saint-Simon, not yet the founder either of 
a philosophy or a religion, and considered only as a 
clever original. The chief fruit which I carried away 
from the society I saw, was a strong and permanent 
interest in Continental Liberalism, of which I ever 
afterwards kept myself au courant, as much as of 
English politics : a thing not at all usual in those days 
with Englishmen, and which ha,d a very salutary in- 
fluence on my development, keeping me free from the 
error always prevalent in England, and from which even 
my father with all his superiority to prejudice was not 
exempt, of judging universal questions by a merely 
English standard. After passing a few weeks at 
Caen with an old friend of my father's, I returned to 
England in July 1821 ; and my education resumed 
its ordinary course. 



CHAPTER IIL 



SELF-EDUCATION. 

L~^OE; the first year or two after my visit to France, 
I continued my old studies, with the addition 
of some new ones. When I returned, my father was 
just finishing for the press his Elements of Political 
Economy, and he made me perform an exercise on 
the manuscript, which Mr. Bentham practised on all 
his own writino-s, makino^ what he called "marginal 
contents ;" a short abstract of every paragraph, to 
enable the writer more easily to judge of, and improve, 
the order of the ideas, and the general character of the 
exjDosition. Soon after, my father put into my hands 
Condillac's Traite des Sensations, and the logical and 
metaphysical volumes of his Cours d'Etudes ; the first 
(notwithstanding the superficial resemblance between 
Condillac's psychological system and my fi:ither's) 
quite as much for a warning as for an example. I am 
not sure whether it was in this winter or the next 
that I first read a history of the French Kevolution. 
I learnt with astonishment, that the principles of 
democracy, then apparently in so insignificant and 



LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION. 63 

hopeless a minority everywhere in Europe, had borne 
all before them in France thirty years earlier, and had 
been the creed of the nation. As may be supposed 
from this, I had previously a very vague idea of that 
great commotion. I knew only that the French had 
thrown off the absolute monarchy of Louis XIY. 
and XV., had put the King and Queen to de^tli, 
guillotined many ^^ersons, one of whom was Lavoisier, 
and had ultimately fallen under the despotism of 
Bonaparte. From this time, as was natural, the 
subject took an immense hold of my feelings. It 
allied itself with all my juvenile aspirations to the 
character of a democratic champion. What had 

. happened so lately, seemed as if it might easily happen 
again : and the most transcendent glory I was capable 
of conceiving, was that of figuring, successful or un- 
successful, as a Girondist in an English Convention. 

During the winter of 1821-2, Mr. John Austin, Avith 
whom at the time of my visit to France my father 
had but lately become acquainted, kindly allowed me 

- to read Eoman- law with him. My father, notwith- 
standing his abhorrence of the chaos of barbarism 
called English Law, had turned his thoughts towards 
the bar as on the whole less ineligible for me than 
any other profession : and these readings with Mi\ 
Austin, who had made Bentham's best ideas his own, 
and added much to them from other sources and from 
his own mind, were not onl v a valuable introduction to 



64 

legal studies, but an important portion of general 
education. With Mr. Austin I read Heineccius on 
the Institutes, his Roman Antiquities, and part of 
his exposition of the Pandects ; to which was added 
a considerable portion of Blackstone. It was at the 
commencement of these studies that my father, as a 
needful accompaniment to them, put into my hands 
Bentham's principal speculations, as interpreted to , 
the Continent, and indeed to all the world, by 
Dumont, in the Traite de Legislation. The reading of 
this book was an epoch in my life ; one of the 
turning points in my mental history. 

My previous education had been, in a certain 
sense, already a course of Benthamism. The Ben- 
thamic standard of *' the greatest happiness " w^as 
that which I had always been taught to apply ; I 
\vas even familiar with an abstract discussion of it, 
forming an episode in an unpublished dialogue on 
Government, written by my father on the Platonic 
model. Yet in the first pages of Bentham it burst 
upon me v/ith all the force of novelty. What thus 
impressed me was the chapter in which Bentliam 
passed judgment on the common modes of reasoning 
in morals and legislation, deduced from phrases like 
"law of nature," " right reason," " the moral sense," 
" natural rectitude," and the like, and characterized 
them as dogmatism in disguise, imposing its senti- 
ments upon others under cover of sounding expressions 



AND FIRST OF SELF-EDUCATION". 65 

wliicli convey no reason for tlie sentiment, but set 
up the sentiment as its own reason. It liad not 
struck me before, that Bentham's principle put an 
end to all this. The feeling rushed upon me, that 
all previous moralists were superseded, and that 
here indeed was the commencement of a new era in 
thought. This impression was strengthened by the 
.manner in which Bentham put into scientific form 
the application of the happiness principle to the 
morality of actions, by analysing the various classes 
and orders of their, consequences. But what struck 
me at that time most of all, was the Classification 
of Offences, which is much more clear, compact 
and imposing in Dumont's redaction than in the 
original work of Bentham from which it was taken. 
Logic and the dialectics of Plato, which had formed 
so large a part of my previous training, had given me 
a strong relish for accurate classification. This taste 
had been strengthened and enlightened by the study 
of botany, on the principles of what is called the 
Natural Method, which I had taken up with great 
zeal, though only as an amusement, during my stay 
in France ; and when I found scientific classification 
applied to the great and complex subject of Punish- 
able Acts, under the guidance of the ethical principle 
of Pleasurable and Painful Consequences, followed 
out in the method of detail introduced into these 
subjects by Bentham, I felb taken up to an eminence 

F 



66 LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, 

from wliicli I could survey a vast mental domain, and 
see stretching out into the distance intellectual 
results beyond all computation. As I proceeded 
further, there seemed to be added to this intellectual 
clearness, the most inspiring prospects of practical 
improvement in human affairs. To Bentham's general 
view of the construction of a body of law I was not 
altogether a stranger, having read with attention 
that admirable compendium, my father's article on 
Jurisprudence : but I had read it with little profit, 
and scarcely any interest, no doubt from its ex- 
tremely general and abstract character, and also 
because it concerned the form more than the 
substance of the corpus juris, the logic rather than 
the ethics of law. But Bentham's subject was LcpIs- 
lation, of which Jurisprudence is only the foiinal part : 
and at every page he seemed to open a clccirer and 
broader conception of what human opinions and 
institutions ought to be, how they might be made 
what they ought to be, and how far removed from it 
they now are. When I laid clown the hist volume 
of the Trait e, I had become a different being. 
The "principle of utility" understood as Bentham 
understood it, and applied in the manner in wliich 
he applied it through these three volumes, fell 
exactly into its place as the keystone which held 
together the detached and fragmentary component 
parts of my knowledge and beliefs. It gave unitj 



AND FIRST OF SELF-EDUCATION. 67 

to my conceptions of tilings. I now had opinions ; a 
creed, a doctrine, a philosophy ; in one among the 
best senses of the word, a rehgion ; the inculcation 
and diffusion of which could be made the principal 
outward purpose of a life. And I had a grand concep- 
tion laid before me of changes to be effected in the 
condition of mankind through that doctrine. The 
Traite de Legislation wound up with what was to 
me a most impressive picture of human life as it 
would be made by such opinions and such laws as 
were recommended in the treatise. The anticipa- 
tions of practicable improvement were studiously 
moderate, deprecating and discountenancing as 
reveries of vague enthusiasm many things which will 
one day seem so natural to human beings, that in- 
justice will probably be done to those who once 
thought them chimerical. But, in my state of mind, 
this appearance of superiority to illusion added to 
the effect which Bentham's doctrines produced on 
me, by heightening the impression of mental power, 
and the vista of improvement which he did open 
was sufficiently large and brilliant to light up my 
life, as well as to give a definite shape to my aspira- 
tions. 

After this I read, from time to time, the most im- 
portant of the other works of Bentham which had 
then seen the light, either as written by himself or 
as edited by Dumont. This was my private reading : 

h' 2 



68 LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, 

while, under my father's dhection, my studies were 
carried into the higher branches of analytic psycho- 
logy. I now read Locke's Essay, and wrote out an 
account of it, consisting of a complete abstract of 
every chapter, with such remarks as occurred to me : 
which was read by, or (I think) to, my father, and dis- 
cussed throughout. I performed the same process with 
Helvetius de I'Esprit, which I read of my own choice. 
This preparation of abstracts, subject to my father's 
censorship, was of great service to me, by compelling 
precision in conceiving and expressing psychological 
doctrines, whether accepted as truths or only regarded 
as the opinion of others. After Helvetius, my father 
made me study what he deemed the really master- 
production in the philosophy of mind, Hartley's 
Observations on Man. This book, though it did not, 
like the Trait e de Legislation, give a new colour to 
my existence, made a very similar impression on me in 
regard to its immediate subject. Hartley's explana- 
tion, incomplete as in many points it is, of the more 
complex mental phenomena by the law of association, 
commended itself to me at once as a real analysis, 
and made me feel by contrast the insufficiency of the 
merely verbal generalizations of Condillac, and even of 
the instructive gropings and feelings about for psycho- 
logical explanations, of Locke. It was at this very time 
that my father commenced writing his Analysis of 
the Mind, which carried Hartley's mode of explaining 



AND FIRST OF SELF-EDUCATION. 69 

tlie mental plienoxnena to so much greater length and 
depth. He could only command the concentration of 
thought necessary for this work, during the complete 
leisure of his holiday of a month or six weeks 
annually : and he commenced it in the summer of 
1822, in the first holiday he passed at Dorking; in 
w^hich neighbourhood, from that time to the end of his 
life, with the exception of two yea,rs, he lived, as far 
as his official duties permxitted, for six months of every 
year. He worked at the Anal)^sis during several 
successive vacations, up to the year 1829 when it was 
published, and allowed me to read the manuscript, 
portion by portion, as it advanced. The other prin- 
clpal English writers on mental philosophy I read as I 
felt inclined, particularly Berkeley, Hume's Essays, 
Ileid, Dugald Stewart and Brown on Cause and 
Effect. Brown's Lectures I did not read until two or 
three years later, nor at that time had my father 
himself read them. 

Among the works read in the course of this year, 
which contributed materially to my development, I 
ought to mention a book (written on the foundation 
of some of Bentham's manuscripts and published 
under the pseudonyme of Philip Bea-uchamp) entitled 
" Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion oi: 
the Temporal Happiness of Mankind." This was an 
examination not of the truth, but of the usefulness 
of religious belief, in the most general sense, apart 



70 LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, 

from tlie peculiarities of any special Ptevelation ; 
which, of all the parts of the discussion concerning 
religion, is the most important in this age, in which 
real belief in any religious doctrine is feeble and 
precarious, but the opinion of its necessity for moral 
and social purposes almost universal ; and when 
those who reject revelation, very generally take 
refuge in an optimistic Deism, a worship of the 
order of Nature, and the supposed course of Provi- 
dence, at least as full of contradictions, and pervert- 
ing to the moral sentiments, as any of the forms of 
Christianity, if only it is as completely realized. Yet, 
very little, with any claim to a philosophical character, 
has been written by sceptics against the usefulness 
of this form of belief The volume bearing the nam^e 
of Philip Beauchamp had this for its special object. 
Having been shown to my father in manuscript, it 
was put into my hands by him, and I made a 
marginal analysis of it as I had done of the Elements 
of Political Economy. Next to the Trait e de 
Legislation, it was one of the books which by the 
searching character of its analysis produced the 
greatest effect upon me. On reading it lately after an 
interval of many years, I find it to have some of the 
defects as well as the merits of the Benthamic modes 
of thought, and to contain, as I now think, many 
AA'eak arguments, but with a great overbalance of 
sound ones, and much good material for a more 



AND FIRST OF SELF-ED UCATIOX. 71 

completely pliilosopliic and conclusive treatment of 
the subject. 

I have now, I believe, mentioned all the books 
which had any considerable effect on my early mental 
development. From this point I began to carry on 
my intellectual cultivation by writing still more than 
by reading. In the summer of 1822 I wrote my 
first argumentative essay. I remember very little 
about it, except that it was an attack on what I 
regarded as the aristocratic prejudice, that the rich 
were, or were likely to be, superior in moral qualities 
to the poor. My performance was entirely argumenta- 
tive, without any of the declamation which the 
subject would admit of, and might be expected to 
suggest to a young writer. In that department 
however I was, and remained, very inapt. Dry 
argument was the only thing I could manage, or 
willingly attempted ; though passively I was very 
susceptible to the effect of all composition, whether 
in the form of poetry or oratory, which appealed to 
the feelings on any basis of reason. My father, who 
knew nothing of this essay until it was finished, was 
well satisfied, and as I learnt from others, even 
pleased with it ; but, perhaps from a desire to 
promote the exercise of other mental faculties thai^i 
the purely logical, he advised me to make my next 
exercise in composition one of the oratorical kind : 
on which suggestion, availing myself of my familiarity 



72 LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, 

with Greek history and ideas and with the Athenian 
orators, I wrote two speeches, one an accusation, 
the other a defence of Pericles, on a supposed im- 
peachment for not marching out to^ftght the Lacede- 
monians on their invasion of Attica. After this I 
continued to write papers on subjects often very 
much beyond my capacity, but with great benefit 
both from the exercise itself, and from the discussions 
which it led to with my father. 

I had now also begun to converse, on general 
subjects, with the instructed men with whom I came 
in contact : and the opportunities of such contact 
naturally became more numerous. The two friends 
of my father from whom I derived most, and with 
whom I most associated, were Mr. Grote and Mr. 
John Austin. The acquaintance of both with my 
father was recent, but had ripened rapidly into 
intimacy. Mr. Grote was introduced to my father 
by Mr. Ricardo, I think in 1819, (being then about 
twenty-five years old), and sought assiduously his 
society and conversation. Already a highly instructed 
man, he was yet, by the side of my father, a tyro in 
he great subjects of human opinion ; but he rapidly 
seized on my father's best ideas ; and in the depart- 
ment of political opinion he made himself known as 
early as J 820, by a pamphlet in defence of Eadical 
Reform, in reply to a celebrated article by Sir James 
Macintosh, then lately published in the Edinburgh 



AND FIRST OF SELF- EDUCATION". 73 

He view. Mr. Grote's father, the banker, Y/as, I 
beheve, a thorough Tory, and his mother intensely 
Evangelical ; so that for his liberal opinions he was in 
no way indebted to home influences. But, unlike 
most persons who have the prospect of being rich by 
inheritance, he had, though actively engaged in the 
business of banking, devoted a great portion of time 
to philosophic studies ; and his intimacy with my 
father did much to decide the character of the next 
stage in his mental progress. Him I often visited, 
and my conversations with him on political, moral, 
and philosophical subjects gave me, in addition 
to much valuable instruction, all the pleasure and 
benefit of sympathetic communion with a man 
of the high intellectual and moral eminence which 
his life and writings have since manifested to the 
world. 

Mr. Austin, who was four or five years older than 
Mr. Grote, was the eldest son of a retired miller in 
Suffolk, who had made money by contracts during 
the war, and v/ho must have been a man of remark- 
able qualities, as I infer from the fact tha,t all his 
sons were of more than common ability and all 
eminently gentlemen. The one with whom we are 
now concerned, and whose writings on jurisprudence 
have made him celebrated, was for some time in the 
army, and served in Sicily under Lord Willi nm 
Bentinck. After the peace he sold his commission and 



74 LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, 

studied for tlie bar, to which he had been called for 
some time before my father knew him. He was not, 
like Mr. Grote, to any extent, a pupil of my father, 
but he had attained, by reading and thought, a 
considerable number of the same opinions, modified 
by his own very decided individuality of character. 
He was a man of great intellectual powers which in 
conversation appeared at their very best ; from the 
vigour and richness of expression with which, under 
the excitement of discussion, he was accustomed to 
maintain some view or other of most general subjects ; 
and from an appearance of not only strong, but 
deliberate and collected will ; mixed with a certain 
bitterness, partly derived from temperament, and 
partly from the general cast of his feehngs and 
reflections. The dissatisfaction with life and the world, 
felt more or less in the present state of society and 
intellect by every discerning and highly conscientious 
mind, gave in his case a rather melancholy tinge to the 
character, very natural to those whose passive moral 
susceptibilities are more than proportioned to their 
active energies. For it must be said, that tlie 
strength of will of which his manner seemed to 
give such strong assurance, expended itself princi- 
pally in manner. With great zeal for human im- 
provement, a strong sense of duty, and capacities and 
acquirements the extent of which is proved by the 
writings he has left, he hardly ever completed any 



AND FIRST OF SELF-EDUCATION. 75 

intellectual task of mao^nitude. He had so hio-li a 
standard of what ought to be done, so exaggerated a 
sense of deficiencies in his own Derformances, and 
was so unable to content himself with the amount of 
elaboration sufficient for the occasion and the purpose, 
that he not only spoilt much of his work for ordinary 
use by overlabouring it, but spent so much time and 
exertion in superfluous study and thought, that when 
his task ought to have been completed, he had 
generally worked himself into an illness, without 
having half finished what he undertook. From this 
mental infirmity (of which he is not the sole example 
among the accomplished and able men whom I have 
known), combined with liability to frequent attacks 
of disabling though not dangerous ill-health, he 
accomplished, through life, little in comparison with 
what he seemed capable of ; but what he did produce 
is held in the very highest estimation by the most 
competent judges ; and, like Coleridge, he might plead 
as a set-ofP that he had been to many persons, 
through his conversation, a source not only of much 
instruction but of great elevation of character. On 
me his influence was most salutary. It was moral 
in the best sense. He took a sincere and kind 
interest in me, far beyond what could have been 
expected towards a mere youth from a man of his 
age, standing, and what seemed austerity of character. 
There was in his conversation and demeanour a tone 



76 LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, 

of liiglimindedness which did not show itself so much, 
if the quality existed as much, in any of the other 
persons with whom at that time I associated. My 
intercourse with him was the more beneficial, owing 
to his being of a different mental type from all other 
intellectual men whom 1 frequented, and he from the 
first set himself decidedly against the prejudices and 
narrownesses which are almost sure to be found in 
a young man formed by a particular mode of thought 
or a particular social circle. 

His younger brother, Charles Austin, of whom at 
this time and for the next year or two I saw much, 
had also a great effect on me, though of a very 
different description. He was but a few years older 
than myself, and had then just left the University, 
where he had shone with great eclat as a man of 
intellect and a brilliant orator and converser. The 
effect he produced on his Cambridge contemporaries 
deserves to be accounted an historical event ; for to 
it may in part be traced the tendency towards 
Liberalism in general, and the Benthamic and 
politico -economic form of it in particular, which, 
showed itself in a portion of the more active-minded 
young men of the higher classes from this time to 
1830. The Union Debating Society, at that timie at 
the height of its reputation, was ,an arena where 
what were then thought extreme opinions, in politics 
and philosophy, were weekly asserted, face to face 



AND FIEST OF SELF-EDUCATIOX. 11 

with tlieir opposites, before audiences consisting of 
\}iiQ elite of tlie Cambridge youth : and thougli many 
persons afterwards of more or less note, (of whom 
Lord Macaulay is the most celebrated), gained their 
first oratorical laurels in those debates, the really 
influential mind among these intellectual gladiators 
was Charles Austin. He continued, after leaving 
the University, to be, by his conversation and per- 
sonal ascendancy, a leader among the same class of 
young men who had been his associates there ; and he 
attached me among others to his car. Through him 
I became acquainted with Macaulay, Hyde and 
Charles Yilliers, Strutt (now Lord Belper), Romilly 
(now Lord Romilly and Master of the Bolls), and 
various others who subsequently figured in literature 
or politics, and among whom I heard discussions on 
many topics, as yet to a certain degree new to me. 
The influence of Charles Austin over me differed 
from that of the persons I have hitherto mentioned, 
in being not the influence of a man over a boy, but 
that of an elder contemporary. It was through him 
that I first felt myself, not a pupil under teachers, 
but a man among men. He was the first person of 
intellect w^hom I met on a ground of equality, 
though as yet much his inferior on that common 
ground. He was a man who never failed to impress 
greatly those with whom he came in contact, even 
when their opinions were the very reverse of his. 



78 LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, 

Tlie impression he gave was that of boundless 
strength, together with talents which, combined 
with such apparent force of will and character, 
seemed capable of dominating the world. Those 
who knew him, whether friendly to him or not, 
always anticipated that he would play a conspicuous 
part in public life. It is seldom that men produce 
so great an immediate effect by speech, unless they, 
in some degree, lay themselves out for it ; ■ and he 
did this in no ordinary degree. He loved to strike, 
and even to startle. He knew that decision is the 
greatest element of effect, and he uttered his 
opinions with all the decision he could throw into 
them, never so well pleased as when he astonished 
any one by their audacity. Very unlike his brother, 
who made war against the narrower interpreta- 
tions and applications of the principles they both 
professed, he, on the contrary, presented the 
Benthamic doctrines in the most startling form 
of which they were susceptible, exaggerating 
everything in them which tended to consequences 
offensive to any one's preconceived feelings. All 
which, he defended with such verve and vivacity, and 
carried off' by a manner so agreeable as well as forcible, 
that he always either came off victor, or divided the 
honours of the field. It is my belief that much of the 
notion popularly entertained of the tenets and sen- 
timents of what are called Benthamites or Utilitarians 



AND riKST OF SELF-EDUCATION. 79 

had its origin in paradoxes thrown out by Charles 
Austin. It must be said, however, that his example 
was followed, haud passibus cequis, by younger pro- 
selytes, and that to outrer whatever was by anybody 
considered offensive in the doctrines and maxims of 
Benthamism, became at one time the badge of a 
small coterie of youths. All of these who had any- 
thing in them, myself among others, quickly outgrew 
this boyish vanity ; and those who had not, became 
tired of differing from other people, and gave up both 
the good and the bad part of the heterodox opinions 
they had for some time professed. 

It was in the winter of 1822-3 that I formed the 
plan of a little society, to be composed of young men 
agreeing in fundamental principles — acknowledging 
Utility as their standard in ethics and politics, and a 
certain number of the principal corollaries drawn from 
it in the philosoj)hy I had accepted — and meeting 
once a fortnight to read essays and discuss questions 
conformably to the premises thus agreed on. The 
fact would hardly be worth mentioning, but for the 
circumstance, that the name I gave to the society I 
had planned was the Utilitarian Society. It was 
the first time that any one had taken the title of 
Utilitarian ; and the term made its way into the 
kinguage, from this humble soiu^ce. I did not invent 
the word, but found it in one of Gait's novels, the 
"Annals of the Parish," in which the Scotch clergy- 



8-0 LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION", 

man, of wliom the book is a supposed autobio- 
graphy, is represented as warning his parishioners 
not to leave the Gospel and become utilitarians. 
Y/ith a boy's fondness for a name and a banner I 
seized on the word, and for some years called myself 
and others by it as a sectarian appellation ; 8.nd it 
came to be occasionally used by some others holding 
the opinions which it was intended to designate. 
As those opinions attracted more notice, the term 
was repeated by strangers and opponents, and got 
into rather common use just about the time when 
those who had originally assumed it, laid down that 
along with other sectarian characteristics. The 
Society so called consisted at first of no more than 
three members, one of whom, being Mr. Eentham s 
amanuensis, obtained for us permission to hold our 
meetings in his house. The number never, I think, 
reached ten, and the society was broken up in 
1826. It had thus an existence of about three 
years and a half The chief effect of it as regards 
myself, over and above the benefit of practice , in 
oral discussion, was that of bringing me in 
contact with several young men at that time less 
advanced than myself, among whom, as they 
professed the same opinions, I was for some time a 
sort of leader, and had considerable influence on 
their mental progress. Any young man of education 
who fell in my way, and whose opinions were not 



AND FIRST OF SELF-EDUCATION. 81 

incompatible with those of the Society, I endeavoured 
to press into its service ; and some others I probably 
should never have known, had they not joined it. 
Those of the members who became my intimate 
companions — no one of whom was in any sense of the 
word a disciple, but all of them independent thinkers 
on their own basis — were Wilham Eyton Tooke, son 
of the eminent political economist, a young man of 
singular worth both moral and intellectual, lost to 
the world by an early death ; his friend William 
Ellis, an original thinker in the field of political 
economy, now honourably known by his apostolic 
exertions for the improvement of education ; George 
Graham, afterwards official assignee of the Bank- 
ruptcy Court, a thinker of originality and power on 
almost all abstract subjects ; and (from the time when 
he came first to England to study for the bar in 1824 
or 1825) a man who has made considerably more 
noise in the world than any of these, John Arthur 
Boebuck. 

In May, 1823, my professional occupation and 
status for the next thirty-five years of my life, were 
decided by my father's obtaining for me an appoint- 
ment from the East India Company, in the office of 
the Examiner of India Correspondence, immediately 
under himself I was appointed in the usual manner, 
at the bottom of the list of clerks, to rise, at least 
in the first instance, by seniority ; but with the 

G 



82 LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, 

understanding that I should be employed from the 
beginning in preparing drafts of despatches, and be 
thus trained up as a successor to those who then 
filled the higher departments of the office. My 
drafts of course required, for some time, much 
revision from my immediate superiors, but I soon 
became well acquainted with the business, and by my 
father's instructions and the general growth of my 
own powers, I was in a few years qualified to be, and 
practically was, the chief conductor of the correspon- 
dence with India in one of the leading departments, 
that of the Native States. This continued to be my 
official duty until I was appointed Examiner, only 
two years before the time when the abolition of the 
East India Company as a poiitical body determined 
my retirement. I do not know any one of the occupa- 
tions by which a subsistence can now be gained, more 
suitable than such as this to any one who, not being in 
independent circumstances, desires to devote a part of 
the twenty-four hours to private intellectual pursuits. 
Writing for the press, cannot be recommended as a 
permanent resource to any one qualified to accomplish 
anything in the higher departments of literature or 
thought : not only on account of the uncertainty 
of this means of livelihood, especially if the writer 
has a conscience, and will not consent to serve any 
opinions except his own ; but also because the 
writmgs by which one can live, are not the writings 



AND FIRST OF SELF-EDUCATION. 83 

wliicli tliemselves live, and are never those In v/Licli 
the writer does his best. Books destined to form 
future thinkers take too much time to write, 
and when written come, in general, too slowly into 
notice and repute, to be relied on for subsistence. 
Those who have to support themselves by their pen 
must depend on literary drudgery, or at best on 
writings addressed to the multitude ; and can employ 
in the pursuits of their own choice, only such tim.e as 
they can spare from those of necessity ; which is 
generally less than the leisure allowed by office occu- 
pations, while the effect on the mind is far more 
enervating and fatiguing. For my own part I have, 
through life, found office duties an actual rest from the 
other mental occupations which I have carried on 
simultaneously with them. They were sufficiently 
intellectual not to be a distasteful drudgery, without 
being such as to cause any strain upon the mental 
powers of a person used to abstract thought, or to 
the labour of careful literary composition. The dra.w- 
backs, for every mode of life has its drawbacks, 
were not, however, unfelt by me. I cared little for tlie 
loss of the chances of riches and honours held out by 
some of the professions, particularly the bar, whicli 
had been, as I have already said, the profession 
thought of for me. But I was not indifferent to ex- 
clusion from Parliament, and public life : and I felt 
very sensibly the more immediate unpleasantness of 

G 2 



84 LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, 

confinement to London ; the holiday allowed by 
India-House practice not exceeding a month in the 
year, while my taste was strong for a country life, 
and my sojourn in France had left behind it an 
ardent desire of travelling. But though these tastes 
could not be freely indulged, they were at no time 
entirely sacrificed. I passed most Sundays, through- 
out the year, in the country, taking long rural walks 
on that day even when residing in London. The 
month's holiday was, for a few years, passed at my 
father's house in the country : afterwards a part or 
the whole was spent in tours, chiefly pedestrian, with 
some one or more of the young men who were my 
chosen companions ; and, at a later period, in longer 
journeys or excursions, alone or with other friends. 
France, Belgium, and Bhenish Germany were within 
easy reach of the annual holiday : and two longer 
absences, one of three, the other of six months, 
under medical advice, added Switzerland, the Tyrol, 
and Italy to my list. Fortunately, also, both these 
journeys occurred rather early, so as to give the 
benefit and charm of the remembrance to a large 
portion of life. 

I am disposed to agree with what has been sur- 
mised by others, that the "opportunity which my 
official position gave me of learning by personal 
observation the necessary conditions of the practical 
conduct of public afiairs, has been of considerable 



AND FIRST OF SELF-EDUCATION. 85 

value to me as a theoretical reformer of the opinions 
and institutions of my time. Not, indeed, that public 
business transacted on paper, to take effect on the 
other side of the globe, was of itself calculated to give 
much practical knowledge of life. But the occupation 
accustomed me to see and hear the difficulties of every 
course, and the means of obviating them, stated and 
discussed deliberately with a view to execution ; it 
gave me opportunities of perceiving when public 
measures, and other political facts, did not produce 
the effects which had been expected of them, and 
from what causes ; above all, it was valuable to me by 
making me, in this portion of my activity, merely one 
wheel in a machine, the whole of which had to work 
together. As a speculative writer, I should have had 
no one to consult but myself, and should have en- 
countered in my speculations none of the obstacles 
which would have started up whenever they came to 
be applied to practice. But as a Secretary con- 
ducting political correspondence, I could not issue an 
order or express an opinion, without satisfying various 
persons very unlike myself, that the thing was fit to 
be done. I was thus in a good position for finding 
out by practice the mode of putting a thought which 
gives it easiest admittance into minds not prepared 
for it by habit ; while I became practically conversant 
with the difficulties of moving bodies of men, the 
necessities of compromise, the art of sacrificing the 



8G LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, ETC. 

non-essential to preserve the essential. I learnt, how 
to obtain the best I could, when I could not obtain 
everything ; instead of being indignant or dispirited 
because I could not have entirely my own way, 
to be pleased and encouraged when I could have the 
smallest part of it ; and when even that could not be, 
to bear with complete equanimity the being overruled 
altogether. I have found, through life, these ac- 
quisitions to be of the greatest possible importance 
for personal happiness, and they are also a very 
necessary condition for enabling any one, either as 
theorist or as practical man, to effect the greatest 
amount of good compatible with his opportunities. 



CIIAPTEH IV. 



YOUTHFUL PHOPAGANDISM. THE WESTMINSTER 
HEVIEW. 

'T^HE occupation of so much of my time by office 
work (lid not relax my attention to my own 
pursuits, wliich were never carried on more vigorously. 
It was about this time that I began to write in 
newspapers. The first writings of mine which got 
into print were two letters published towards the 
end of 1822, in the Traveller evening newspaper. 
The Traveller (which afterwards grew into the " Globe 
and Traveller," by the purchase and incorporation of 
the Globe) was then the property of the well-known 
political economist. Colonel Torrens, and under the 
editorship of an able man, Mr. Walter Coulson (who, 
after being an amanuensis of Mr. Bentham, became 
a reporter, then an editor, next a barrister and con- 
veyancer, and died Counsel to the Home Office), it 
had become one of the most important newspaper 
organs of Liberal politics. Colonel Torrens himself 
wrote much of the political economy of his paper ; 
and had at this time made an attack upon some 
opmion of Hicardo and my father, to which, at my 



88 YOtJTHPUL mOPAGANDISM. 

father's instigation, I attempted an answer, and 
Coulson, out of consideration for my father and 
goodwill to me, inserted it. There was a reply by 
Torrens, to which I again rejoined. I soon after 
attempted something considerably more ambitious. 
The prosecutions of Richard Carlile and his wife and 
sister for publications hostile to Christianity, were 
then exciting much attention, and nowhere more 
than among the people I frequented. Freedom of 
discussion even in politics, much more in religion, 
was at that time far from being, even in theory, the 
conceded point which it at least seems to be now ; 
and the holders of obnoxious opinions had to be 
always ready to argue and re-argue for the liberty of 
expressing them. I wrote a series of five letters, 
under the signature of Wickliffe, going over the 
whole length and breadth of the question of free 
pubHcation of all opinions on religion, and offered 
them to the Morning Chronicle. Three of them were 
published in January and February, 1823 ; the other 
two, containing things too outspoken for that journal, 
never appeared at all. But a paper which I wrote 
soon after on the same subject, a propos of a debate 
in the House of Commons, was inserted as a leading 
article; and during the whole of this year, 1823, 
a considerable number of my contributions were 
printed in the Chronicle and Traveller : sometimes 
notices of books but oftener letters, commenting on 



YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISM. 89 

some nonsense talked in Parliament, or some defect 
of the law, or misdoings of the magistracy or the 
courts of justice. In this last department the 
Chronicle was now rendering signal service. After 
the death of Mr. Perry, the editorship and manage- 
ment of the paper had devolved on Mr. John Black, 
long a reporter on its establishment ; a man of most 
extensive reading and information, great honesty and 
simplicity of mind ; a particular friend of my father, 
imbued with many of his and Bentham's ideas, which 
he reproduced in his articles, among other valuable 
thoughts, with great facility and skill. From this 
time the Chronicle ceased to be the merely Whig 
organ it v/as before, and during the next ten years 
became to a considerable extent a vehicle of the 
opinions of the Utilitarian Radicals. This was 
mainly by what Black himself wrote, with some 
assistance from Fonblanque, who first showed his 
eminent qualities as a writer by articles and jeux 
despi'it in the Chronicle. The defects of the law, and 
of the administration of justice, were the subject on 
which that paper rendered most service to improve- 
ment. Up to that time hardly a word had been said, 
except by Bentham and my father, against that most 
peccant part of English institutions and of their ad- 
ministration. It was the almost universal creed of 
Englishmen, that the law of England, the judica- 
ture of England, the unpaid magistracy of England, 



9 YOUTHFUL PROPAG ANDISM. 

were models of excellence. I do not go beyond the 
mark in saying, that after Bentham, who supplied 
the principal materials, the greatest share of the 
merit of breaking down this wretched superstition 
belongs to Black, as editor of the Morning Chronicle. 
He kept up an incessant fire against it, exposing the 
absurdities and vices of the law and the courts of 
justice, paid and unpaid, until he forced some sense 
of them into people's minds. On many other ques- 
tions he became the organ of opinions much in 
advance of any which had ever before found 
regular advocacy in the newspaper press. Black 
was a frequent visitor of my father, and Mr. Grote 
used to say that he always knew by the Monday 
morning s article, whether Black had been with my 
father on the Sunday. Black was one of the most 
influential of the many channels through which 
my father's conversation and personal influence made 
his opinions tell on the world ; co-operating with the 
effect of his writings in making him a power in the 
country, such as it has rarely been the lot of an indi- 
vidual in a private station to be, through the mere 
force of intellect and character : and a power which 
was often acting the most efiiciently where it was 
least seen and suspected. I have already noticed 
how much of what was done by Eicardo, Hume, and 
Grote, was the result, in part, of his prompting 
and persuasion. He was the good genius by the 



THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 91 

side of Brougliam in most of what lie did for the 
pubHc, either on education, law reform, or any other 
subject. And his influence flowed in minor streams 
too numerous to be specified. This influence was 
now about to receive a great extension by the 
foundation, of the Westminster Review. 

Contrary to what may have been supposed, my 
father was in no degree a party to setting up the 
Westminster Review. The need of a Radical organ 
to make head against the Edinburgh and Quarterly 
(then in the period of their greatest reputation and 
influence), had been a to^Dic of conversation between 
him and Mr. Bentham many years earlier, and it had 
been a part of their Chateau en Espagne that my 
father should be the editor ; but the idea had never 
assumed any practical shape. In 1823, however, 
Mr. Bentham determined to establish the Review 
at his own cost, and offered the editorship to my 
father, who declined it as incompatible with his India 
House appointment. It was then entrusted to Mr. 
(now Sir John) Bowring, at that time a merchant in 
the City. Mr. Bowring had been for two or three 
years previous an assiduous frequenter of Mr. 
Bentham, to whom he was recommended by many 
personal good qualities, by an ardent admiration for 
Bentham, a zealous adoption of many, though not 
all of his opinions, and, not least, by an extensive 
acquaintanceship and correspondence with Liberals 



92 THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 

of all countries, wliicli seemed to qualify liim for 
being a p'owerful agent in spreading Bentliam's 
fame and doctrines through all quarters of the 
world. My father had seen little of Bo wring, but 
knew enough of him to have formed a strong 
ojjinion, that he was a man of an entirely different 
type from what my father considered suitable for 
conducting a political and philosophical Beview : and 
he augured so ill of the enterprise that he regretted 
it altogether, feeling persuaded not only that Mr. 
Bentham would lose his money, but that discredit 
would probably be brought upon Badical principles. 
He could not, however, desert Mr. Eentham, and 
he consented to write an article for the first 
number. As it had been a favourite portion of the 
scheme formerly talked of, that part of the work 
should be devoted to reviewing the other Beviews, 
this article of my father's was to be a general criti- 
cism of the Edinburgh Beview from its commencement. 
Before writing it he made me read through all the 
volumes of the Beview, or as much of each as seemed 
of any importance (which was not so arduous a task 
in 1823 as it would be now), and make notes for 
him of the articles which I thought he would wish 
to examine, either on account of their good or their 
bad qualities. This paper of my father's was the 
chief cause of the sensation which the Westminster 
Beview produced at its first appearance, and is, both 



THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 93 

in conception and in execution, one of the most 
striking of all his writings. He began by an 
analysis of the tendencies of periodical literature 
in general ; pointing out, that it cannot, like books, 
wait for success, but must succeed immediately, or 
not at all, and is hence almost certain to profess and 
inculcate the opinions already held by the public 
to which it addresses itself, instead of attempting 
to rectify or improve those opinions. He next, to 
characterize the position of the Edinburgh Review as 
a political organ, entered into a complete analysis, 
from the Radical point of view, of the British Con- 
stitution. He held up to notice its thoroughly 
aristocratic character : the nomination of a majority 
of the House of Commons by a few hundred families ; 
the entire identification of the more independent 
portion, the county members, with the great land- 
holders ; the different classes whom this narrow 
oligarchy was induced, for convenience, to admit to 
a share of power ; and finally, what he called its 
two props, the Church, and the legal profession. 
He pointed out the natural tendency of an aris- 
tocratic body of this composition, to group itself into 
two parties, one of them in possession of the execu- 
tive, the other endeavouring to supplant the former 
and become the predominant section by the aid of 
public opinion, without any essential sacrifice of the 
aristocratical predominance. He described the course 



94 THE WESTMINSTER EEYIEW. 

likely to be pursued, and the political ground occu- 
pied, by an aristocratic party in opposition, coquetting 
with popular principles for the sake of popular 
support. He showed how this idea was realized in 
the conduct of the Whig party, and of the Edinburgh 
Keview as its chief literary organ. He described, as 
their main characteristic, what he termed " seesaw ;" 
writing alternately on both sides of every question 
which touched the power or intei'est of the governing 
classes ; sometimes in different articles, sometimes in 
different parts of the same article : and illustrated 
his position by copious specimens. So formidable 
an attack on the Whig party and policy had never 
before been made ; nor had so great a blow been ever 
struck, in this country, for Radicalism ; nor was there, 
I believe, any living person capable of writing that 
article, except my father.* 

In the meantime the nascent Review had formed a 
junction with another project, of a purely literary 
periodical, to be edited by Mr. Henry Southern, 
afterwards a diplomatist, then a literary man by pro- 
fession. The two editors agreed to unite their corps, 
and divide the editorship, Bowring taking the poli- 
tical, Southern the literary department. Southern's 



* The continuation of tliis article in the second number of the 
lleview was written by nic under my father's eye, and (except as 
practice in composition, in which respect it was, to me, more useful 
than anything else I ever wrote) was of little or no value. 



THE WESTMINSTEH REVIEW. 95 

Review was to have been published by Longman, and 
that firm, though part proprietors of the Edinburgh, 
were willing to be the publishers of the new journal. 
But when all the arrangements had been made, and 
the prospectuses sent out, the Longmans saw my 
father's attack on the Edinburgh, and drew back. 
My father was now appealed to for his interest with 
his own publisher, Baldwin, which was exerted with a 
successful result. And so, in April, 1824, amidst 
anything but hope on my father's part, and that of 
most of those who afterwards aided in carrying on 
the Review, the first number made its appearance. 
That number was an agreeable surprise to most of us. 
The average of the articles was of much better quality 
than had been expected. The literary and artistic 
department had rested chiefly on Mr. Bingham, a 
barrister (subsequently a police magistrate), who had 
been for some years a frequenter of Bentham, was a 
friend of both the Austins, and had adopted with 
great ardour Mr. Bentham 's philosophical opinions. 
Partly from accident, there were in the first number 
as many as ^ve articles by Bingham ; and we were 
extremely pleased with them. I well remember the 
mixed feeling I myself had about the Review ; the 
joy at finding, what we did not at all expect, that it was 
sufficiently good to be capable of being made a 
creditable organ of those who held the opinions it 
professed ; and extreme vexation, since it was so good 



■ 



.6 THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 

on the whole, at what we thought the blemishes of it. 
When, however, in addition to our generally favour- 
able opinion of it, we learned that it had an extra- 
ordinary large sale for a first number, and found that 
the appearance of a Radical Review, with pretensions 
equal to those of the established organs of parties, 
had excited much attention, there could be no room 
for hesitation, and we all became eager in doing every- 
thing we could to strengthen and improve it. 

My father continued to write occasional articles. 
The Quarterly Review received its exposure, as a sequel 
to that of the Edinburgh. Of his other contribu- 
tions, the most important were an attack on Southey's 
Book of the Church, in the fifth number, and a 
political article in the twelfth. Mr. Austin only con- 
tributed one paper, but one of great merit, an 
argument against primogeniture, in reply to an article 
then lately published in the Edinburgh Review by 
M'Culloch. Grote also was a contributor only once ; 
all the time he could spare being already taken up 
with his History of Greece. The article he wrote 
was on his own subject, and was a very complete ex- 
posure and castigation of Mitford. Bingham and 
Charles Austin continued to write for some time ; 
Fonblanque was a frequent contributor from the 
third number. Of my particular associates, Ellis was 
a regular writer up to the ninth number ; and about 
the time when he left off, others of the set began ; 



THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 97 

Eyton Tooke, Graham, and Roebuck. I was myself 
the most frequent writer of all, having contributed, 
from the second number to the eighteenth, thirteen 
articles ; reviews of books on history and political 
economy, or discussions on special political topics, as 
corn laws, game laws, law of hbel. Occasional 
articles of merit came in from other acquaintances of 
my father's, and, in time, of mine ; and some of 
Mr. Bowring's writers turned out well. On the 
whole, however, the conduct of the Review was never 
satisfa,ctory to any of the persons strongly in- 
terested in its principles, with whom I came in 
contact. Hardly ever did a number come out with- 
out containing several things extremely offensive 
to us, either in point of opinion, of taste, or by mere 
want of ability. The unfavourable judgments passed 
by my father, Grote, the two Austins, and others, 
were re-echoed with exaggeration by us younger 
people ; and as our youthful zeal rendered us by no 
means backward in making complaints, we led the two 
editors a sad life. From my knowledge of what I then 
was, I have no doubt that we were at least as often wrona: 
as right; and I am very certain that if the Review 
had been carried on according to our notions (I mean 
those of the juniors), it would have been no better, 
perhaps not even so good as it was. But it is worth 
noting as a fact in the history of Benthamism, that 
the periodical organ, by which it was best known, was 

H 



98 THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 

from the first extremely unsatisfactory to tliose wKose 
opinions on all subjects it was supposed specially to 
represent. 

Meanv/liile, however, the Review made conside- 
rable noise in the world, and gave a recognised status, 
in the arena of opinion and discussion, to the Ben- 
thamic type of Radicalism, out of all proportion to the 
number of its adherents, and to the personal merits 
and abilities, at that time, of most of those who could 
be reckoned among them. It was a time, as is known, 
of rapidly rising Liberalism. When the fears and 
animosities accompanying the war with France had 
been brought to an end, and people had once more a 
place in their thoughts for home politics, the tide 
began to set towards reform. The renewed oppres- 
sion of the Continent by the old reigning families, the 
f!Ountenance apparently given by the English Govern- 
ment to the conspiracy against liberty called the 
Holy Alliance, and the enormous weight of the 
national debt and taxation occasioned by so long 
and costly a war, rendered the government and parlia- 
ment very unpopular. Radicalism, under the leader- 
ship of the Burdetts and Cobbetts, had assumed i 
character and importance which seriously alarmed the 
Administration : and their alarm had scarcely been 
temporarily assuaged by the celebrated Six Acts, 
when the trial of Queen Caroline roused a still wider 
and deeper feeling of hatred. Though the outward 



THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 99 

Signs of tills hatred passed away with its exciting 
cause, there arose on all sides a spirit which had 
never shown itself before, of opposition to abuses in 
detail. Mr. Hume's persevering scrutiny of the public 
expenditure, forcing the House of Commons to a 
division on every objectionable item in the estimates, 
had begun to tell with great force on public opinion, 
and had extorted many minor retrenchments from 
an unwilling administration. Political economy had 
asserted itself with great vigour in public afiPairs, by 
the petition of the merchants of London for free 
trade, drawn wp in 1820 by Mr. Tooke and presented 
by Mr. Alexander Baring ; and by the noble exertions 
of E;icardo during the few years of his parliamentary 
life. His writings, following up the impulse given by 
the Bullion controversy, and followed up in their turn 
by the expositions and comments of my father and 
M'Culloch (whose writings in the Edinburgh Review 
during those years were most valuable), had drawn 
general attention to the subject, making at least 
partial converts in the Cabinet itself ; and Huskisson, 
STipported by Canning, had commenced that gradual 
demolition of the protective system, which one of their 
colleagues virtually completed in 1846, though the 
last vestiges were only swept away by Mr. Gladstone 
in 1860. Mr. Peel, then Home Secretary, was enter- 
ing cautiously into the untrodden and pecunarly 
Benthamic path of Law Reform. At this period, when 

H 2 



100 THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 

Liberalism seemed to be becoming the tone of tbe 
time, when improvement of institutions was preached 
from the highest places, and a complete change of the 
constitution of Parliament was loudly demanded in 
the lowest, it is not strange that attention should have 
been roused by the regular appearance in controversy 
of what seemed a new school of writers, claiming to 
be the legislators and theorists of this new ten- 
dency. The air of strong conviction with which they 
wrote, when scarcely any one else seemed to have 
an equally strong faith in as definite a creed ; the 
boldness with which they tilted against the very 
front of both the existing political parties ; their un- 
compromising profession of opposition to many of the 
generally received opinions, and the suspicion they 
lay under of holding others still more heterodox 
than they professed ; the talent and verve of at least 
my father's articles, and the appearance of a corps 
behind him sufficient to carry on a Review ; and 
finally, the fact that the Review was bought and 
read, made the so-called Bentham school in philo- 
sophy and politics fill =a greater place in the public 
mind than it had held before, or has ever again 
held since other equally earnest schools of thought 
have arisen in England. As I was in the head- 
quarters of it, knew of what it was composed, and 
as one of the most active of its very small number, 
might say without undue assumption, quorum pars 



THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. • 101 

wagna fui, it belongs to me more tlian to most others, 
to give some account of it. 

This supposed school, then, had no other existence 
than what was constituted by the fact, that my 
father's writings and conversation drew round him 
a certain number of young men who had already 
imbibed, or who imbibed from him, a greater or 
' smaller portion of his very decided political and 
philosophical opinions. The notion that Bentham 
was surrounded by a band of disciples who received 
their opinions from his lips, is a fable to which my 
fcither did justice in his "Fragment on Mackintosh," 
and which, to all who knew Mr. JBentham's habits of 
life and manner of conversation, is simply ridicu- 
lous. The influence which Bentham exercised was 
by his writings. Through them he has produced, 
and is producing, effects on the condition of man- 
kind, wider and deeper, no doubt, than any which 
can be attributed to my father. He is a much 
greater name in history. But my father exercised 
a far greater personal ascendancy. He was sought 
for the vigour and instructiveness of his conversa- 
tion, and did use it largely as an instrument for the 
cliiiusion of his opinions. I have never known any 
man who could do such ample justice to his best 
thoughts in colloquial discussion. His perfect com- 
mand over his great mental resources, the terseness 
and expressiveness of . his lai^guage and the moral 



102 THE WESTMINSTEH REVIEW. 

earnestness as well as intellectual force of his 
deli very, made him one of the most striking of all argu- 
mentative conversers : and he was full of anecdote, 
a hearty laugher, and, when with people whom he 
liked, a most lively and amusing companion. It 
was not solely, or even chiefly, in diffusing his 
merely intellectual convictions that his power 
showed itself : it v^as still more through the influence 
of a quality, of which I have only since learnt to 
appreciate the extreme rarity : that exalted public 
spirit, and regard above all things to the good of 
the whole, which warmed into life and activity every 
germ of similar virtue that existed in the minds 
he came in contact with : the desire he made them 
feel for his a23probation, the shame at his disap- 
proval ; the moral support which his conversation and 
his very existence gave to those who were aiming at 
the same objects, and the encouragement he afforded 
to the fainthearted or desponding among them, by 
the firm confidence which (though the reverse of 
sanguine as to the results to be expected in any 
one particular case) he always felt in the power of 
reason, the general progress of improvement, and 
the good which individuals could do by judicious 
efibrt. 

It was my father's opinions which gave tlie 
distinguishing cliaracter to the Benthamic or 
utilitarian propagandisin of that time. They fell 



THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 103 

singly, scattered from him, in many directions, but 
they flowed from him in a continued stream 
principally in three channels. One was through 
me, the only mind directly formed by his instiTic- 
tions, and through whom considerable influence was 
exercised over various young men, who became, 
in their turn, propagandists. A second was through 
some of the Cambridge contemporaries of Charles 
Austin, who, either initiated by him or under the 
general mental impulse which he gave, had adopted 
many opinions allied to those of my father, and some 
of the more considerable of whom afterwards sought 
my father s acquaintance and frequented his house. 
Among these may be mentioned Strutt, afterwards 
Lord Belper, and the present Lord Romilly, with 
whose eminent father, Sir Samuel, my father had of 
old been on terms of friendship. The third channel 
was that of a younger generation of Cambridge 
undergraduates, contemporary, not with Austin, but 
with Eyton Tooke, who were drawn to that estimable / 
person by affinity of opinions, and introduced by 
him to my father : the most notable of these was 
Charles Buller. Various other persons individually 
received and transmitted a considerable amount of 
my father's influence : for example, Black (as before 
mentioned) and Fonblanque : most of these, ho vv - 
ever, we accounted only partial allies ; Fonblanque, 
for instance, was always divergent from us on many 



104 THE WESTMINSTER EEVIEW. 

important points. But indeed tliere was hj no means 
complete unanimity among any portion of us, nor 
liad any of us adopted implicitly all my father's 
opinions. For example, altliough liis Essay on 
Government was regarded probably by all of us as a 
masterpiece of political wisdom, our adhesion by no 
means extended to the paragraph of it, in which he 
maintains that women may consistently with good 
government, be excluded from the suffrage, because 
their interest is the same with that of men. 
From this doctrine, I, and all those who formed my 
chosen associates, most positively dissented. It is 
due to my father to say that he denied having 
intended to affirm that women should be excluded, 
any more than men under the age of forty, con- 
cerning whom he n^aintained, in tlie very next 
paragraph, an exactly similar tliesis. He was, as 
he truly said, not discussing whether the suffrage 
had better be restricted, but only (assuming that 
it is to be restricted) w4iat is the utmost limit 
of restriction, which does not necessarily involve a 
sacrifice of the securities for P^ood 2:overnment. But 
I thought then, as I have always thought since, that 
the opinion which he acknowledged, no less than 
that which he disclaimed, is as great an error as any 
of those against which the Essay was directed ; that 
the interest of women is included in that of men 
exactly as much and no more, as the interest of 



THE WESTMINSTER KEVIEW. 105 

subjects is included in tliat of kings ; and that every 
reason which exists for giving the suffrage to any- 
body, demands that it should not be withheld from 
women. This was also the general opinion of the 
younger proselytes ; and it is pleasant to be able to 
say that Mr. Bentham, on this important point, was 
wholly on our side. 

But though none of us, probably, agreed in every 
respect vdth my father, his opinions, as I said before, 
were the princi23al element which gave its colour and 
character to the little group of young men who were 
the first pro|)agators of what was afterwards called 
'*' Philosophic Ptadicalism." Their mode of thinking 
was not chai-acterized by Benthamism in any sense 
which has relation to Bentham as a chief or guide, 
but rather by a combination of Bentham's point 
of view with that of the modern political eco- 
nomy, and with the Hartleian metaphysics. Mal- 
thus's population principle was quite as much a 
banner, and point of union among us, as any opinion 
specially belonging to Bentham. This great doc- 
trine, originally brought forward as an argument 
against the indefinite improvability of human afiairs, 
we took up with ardent zeal in the contrary sense, 
as indicating the sole means of realizing that im- 
provability by securing full employment at high wages 
to the whole labouring population through a volun- 
tary restriction of the increase of their numbers. The 



106 THE WESTMINSTEE EEYIEW. 

otlier leading cliaracteristics of the creed, whicli we lield 
in common with my father, may be stated as follows : 
In politics, an almost unbounded confidence in the 
efficacy of two things : representative government, 
and complete freedom of discussion. So complete was 
my father's reliance on the influence of reason over 
the minds of mankind, whenever it is allowed to reach 
them, that he felt as if all would be gained if the 
whole population were taught to read^ if all sorts of 
opinions were allowed to be addressed to them by 
word and in writing, and if by means of the suffrage 
they could nominate a legislature to give effect to the 
opinions they adopted. He thought that when the 
legislature no longer represented a class interest, it 
would aim at the general interest, honestly and with 
adequate wisdom ; since the people would be suffi- 
ciently under the guidance of educated intelligence, 
to make in general a good choice of persons to repre- 
sent them, and having done so, to leave to those 
whom they had chosen a liberal discretion. Accord- 
ingly aristocratic rule, the government of the Few 
in any of its shapes, being in his eyes the only thing 
which stood between mankind and an administration 
of their affairs by the best wisdom to be found among 
them, was the object of his sternest disapprobation, 
and a democratic suffrage the principal article of his 
political creed, not on the ground of liberty. Rights of 
Man, or any of the phrases, more or less significant, 



I 



THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 107 

by wliicli, up to tliat time, democracy had usually 
been defended, but as the most essential of " se- 
curities for good government." In this, too, he held 
fast only to what he deemed essentials ; he was 
comparatively indifferent to monarchical or republican 
forms — ^far more so than Bentham, to whom a king, 
in the character of '^ corrupter-general," appeared 
necessarily very noxious. Next to aristocracy, an 
established church, or corporation of priests, as being 
by position the great depravers of religion, and 
interested in opposing the progress of the human 
mind, was the object of his greatest detestation ; 
though he disliked no clergyman personally who did 
not deserve it, and was on terms of sincere friendship 
with several. In ethics, his moral feelings were 
energetic and rigid on all points which he deemed, 
important to human well being, while he was 
supremely indifferent in opinion (though his indiffe- 
rence did not show itself in personal conduct) to all 
those doctrines of the common morality, which he 
thought had no foundation but in asceticism and priest- 
craft. He looked forward, for example, to a consider- 
able increase of freedom in the relations between the 
sexes, though without pretending to define exactly 
what would be, or ought to be, the precise conditions 
of that freedom. This opinion was connected in him 
with no sensuality either of a theoretical or of a 
practical kind. He anticipated, on the contrary, as 



108 THE WESTMINSTER REYIEW. 

one of tlie beneficial effects of increased freedom, 
that the imagination would no longer dwell upon the 
physical relation and its adjuncts, and swell this 
into one of the principal objects of life ; a perversion 
of the imagination and feelings, which he regarded as 
one of the deepest seated and most pervading evils in 
the human mind. In psychology, his fundamental 
doctrine was the formation of all human character by 
circumstances, through the universal Principle of 
xissociation, and the consequent unlimited possibility 
of improving the moral and intellectual condition of 
mankind by education. Of all his doctrines none 
was more important than this, or needs more to be 
insisted on : unfortunately there is none which is more 
contradictory to the prevailing tendencies of specula- 
tion, both in his time and since. 

These various opinions were seized on with youth- 
ful fanaticism by the little knot of young men of 
whom I was one : and we put into them a sectarian 
spirit, from which, in intention at ie£ist, my father was 
wholly free. What we (or rather a phantom substi- 
tuted in the place of us) were sometimes, by a ridiculous 
exaggeration, called by others, namely a " school," 
some of us for a time really hoped and aspired to 
be. The French philosoplies of the eighteenth 
century were the example we sought to imitate, and 
we hoped to accomplish no less results. No one of 
the set went to so great excesses in this boyish am- 



THE WESTMINSTER KEVIEW. 109 

bition as I did ; wHcli might be shown by many parti- 
culars, were it not an useless waste of space and time. 

All this, however, is properly only the outside of 
our existence ; or, at least, the intellectual part 
alone, and no more than one side of that. In 
attempting to penetrate inward, and give any indi- 
cation of what we were as human beings, I must be 
understood as speaking only of myself, of whom alone 
I can speak from sufficient knowledge ; and I do not 
believe that the picture would suit any of my com- 
panions without many and great modifications. 

I conceive that the description so often given of a 
Benthamite, as a mere reasoning machine, though ex- 
tremely inapplicable to most of those who have been 
designated by that title, was during two or three years 
of my life not altogether untrue of me. It was 
perhaps as applicable to me as it can well be to any one 
just entering into life, to whom the common objects of 
desire must in general have at least the attraction of 
novelty. There is nothing very extraordinary in this 
fact : no youth of the age I then was, can be expected 
to be more than one thing, and this was the thing I 
happened to be. Ambition and desire of distinction, 
I had in abundance ; and zeal for what I thought the 
good of mankind was my strongest sentiment, mixing 
with and colouring all others. But my zeal was as yet 
little else, at that period of my life, than zeal for 
speculative opinions. It had not its root in genuine 



110 THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 

benevolence, or sympathy with mankind ; though 
these qnahties held then- due place in my ethical 
standard. Nor was it connected with any higji 
enthusiasm for ideal nobleness. Yet of this feeling I 
was imaginatively very susceptible ; but there was 
at that time an intermission of its natural aliment, 
poetical culture, while there was a superabundance 
of the-discipline antagonistic to it, that of mere logic 
and analysis. Add to this that, as already mentioned, 
my father's teachings tended to the undervaluing of 
feeling. It was not that he was himself cold-hearted 
or insensible ; I believe it was rather from the contrary 
quality ; he thought that feeling could take care of 
itself ; that there was sure to be enough of it if actions 
were properly cared about. Offended by the frequency 
with which, in ethical and philosophical controversy, 
feeling is made the ultimate reason and justification 
of conduct, instead of being itself called on for a 
justification, while, in practice, actions the effect of 
which on human happiness is mischievous, are defended 
as being required by feeling, and the character of a 
person of feeling obtains a credit for desert, which he 
thought only due to actions, he had a real impatience 
of attributing praise to feeling, or of any but the most 
sparing reference to it, either in the estimation of 
persons or in the discussion of things. In addition 
to the influence which this characteristic in him, had 
on me and others, we, found all the opinions to which 



THE WESTMINSTER EEVIEW. Ill 

wc attached most importance, constantly attacked on 
the ground of feeling. Utility was denounced as 
cold calculation ; political economy as hard-hearted ; 
anti-population doctrines as repulsive to the natural 
feelings of mankind. We retorted by the word 
*' sentimentality," which, along with "declamation" 
and "vaofue ofeneralities/' served us as common terms 
of opprobrium. Although we were generally in the 
right, as against those who were opposed to us, the 
effect was that the cultivation of feeling (except the 
feelings of public and private duty), was not in much 
esteem among us, and had very little place in the 
thoughts of most of us, myself in particular. What 
we principally thought of, was to alter people's 
opinions ; to make them believe according to evidence, 
and know what was their real interest, which when 
they once knew, they wmild, we thought, by the 
instrument of opinion, enforce a regard to it upon one 
another. While fully recognising the superior ex- 
cellence of unselfish benevolence and love of justice, 
we did not expect the regeneration of mankind from 
any direct action on those sentiments, but from the 
effect of educated intellect, enlightening the selfish 
feelings. Although this last is prodigiously im- 
portant as a means of improvement in the hands of 
those who are theitiselves impelled by nobler principles 
of action, I do not believe that any one of the sur- 
vivors of the Benthamites or Utilitarians of that day, 



112 THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 

now relies mainly upon it for tlie general amendment 
of human conduct. 

From this neglect both in theory and in practice of 
the cultivation of feeling, naturally resulted, among 
other things, an undervaluing of poetry, and of 
Imagination generally, as an element of human 
nature. It is, or was, part of the popular notion of Ben- 
thamites, that they are enemies of poetry : this was 
partly true of Bentham himself ; he used to say that 
" all poetry is misrepresentation :" but in the sense in 
which he said it, the same might have been said of 
all impressive speech ; of all representation or incul- 
cation more oratorical in its character than a sum in 
arithmetic. An article of Bingham's in the first 
number of the Westminster Beview, in which he 
offered as an explanation of something which he dis- 
liked in Moore, that " Mr. Moore is a poet, and there- 
fore is not di^ reasoner," did a good deal to attach the 
notion of hating poetry to the writers in the Beview. 
But the truth was that many of us were great readers 
of poetry ; Bingham himself had been a writer of it, 
while as regards me (and the same thing might be 
said of my father), the correct statement would be, 
not that I disliked poetry, but that I was theoretically 
indifferent to it. I disliked any sentiments in poetry 
which I should have disliked in prose ; and that in- 
cluded a great deal. And I was wholly blind to its 
place in human culture, as a means of educating the 



YOUTHFUL PKOPAGANDISM. 113 

feelings. But I was always personally very susceptible 
to some kinds of it. In the most sectarian period 
of my Bentliamism, I happened to look into Pope's 
Essay on Man, and though every opinion in it was 
contrary to mine, I well remember how powerfully it 
acted on my imagination. Perhaps at that time 
poetical composition of any higher type than eloquent 
discussion in verse, might not have produced a similar 
effect me : at all events I seldom gave it an oppor- 
tunity. This, however, was a mere passive state. 
Long before I had enlarged in any considerable degree, 
the basis of my intellectual creed, I had obtained in 
the natural course of my mental progress, poetic 
culture of the most valuable kind, by means of 
reverential admiration for the lives and characters of 
heroic persons ; especially the heroes of philosophy. 
The same insj)iring effect which so many of the bene- 
factors of mankind have left on record that they had 
experienced from Plutarch's Lives, was produced on 
me by Plato's pictures of Socrates, and by some 
modern biographies, above all by Condorcet's Life of 
Turgot ; a book well calculated to rouse the best sort 
of enthusiasm, since it contains one of the wisest and 
noblest of lives, delineated by one of the wisest and 
noblest of men. The heroic virtue of these glorious 
representatives of the opinions with which I sympa- 
thized, deeply affected me, and I perpetually recurred 
to them as others do to a favourite poet, when need- 

I 



114 YOUTHFUL PPvOPAGANDISM. 

ing to be carried up into the more elevated regions 
of feeling and tliouglit. I may observe by the way 
that this book cured me of my sectarian follies. The 
two or three pages beginning " II regard ait toute 
secte comme nuisible," and explaining why Target 
always kept himself perfectly distinct from the En- 
cyclopedists, sank deeply into my mind. I left off 
designating myself and others as Utilitarians, and by 
the pronoun " we" or any other collective designation, 
I ceased to afficher sectarianism. My real inward 
sectarianism I did not get rid of till later, and much 
more gradually. 

About the end of 1824, or beginning of 1825, Mr. 
Bentham, having lately got back his papers on Evi- 
dence from M. Dumont (whose Traite des Preuves Judi- 
ciaires, grounded on them, was then first comjoleted 
and published) resolved to have them printed in the 
original, and bethought himself of me as capable of 
preparing them for the press ; in the same manner 
as his Book of Fallacies had been recently edited 
by Bingham. I gladly undertook this task, and it 
occupied nearly all my leisure for about a year, ex- 
clusive of the time afterwards spent in seeing the 
five large volumes through the press. Mr. Bentham 
had begun this treatise three times, at considerable 
intervals, each time in a different manner, and each 
time Avithout reference to the preceding : two of the 
three times he had gone over nearly tlie whole sub- 



YOUTHFUL PUOPAGANDISM. 115 

ject. These tliree masses of manuscript it was my 
business to condense into a single treatise ; adopting 
the one last written as the groundwork, and incor- 
porating with it as much of the two others as it had 
not completely superseded. I had also to unroll such 
of Bentham's involved and parenthetical sentences, as 
seemed to overpass by their complexity the measure 
of what readers were likely to take the pains to 
understand. It was further Mr. Bentham's parti- 
cular desire that I should, from myself, endeavour 
to supply any la ounce which he had left ; and at his 
instance I read, for this purpose, the most authorita- 
tive treatises on the English Law of Evidence, and 
commented on a few of the objectionable points of 
the English rules, which had escaped Bentham's 
notice. I also replied to the objections which had 
been made to some of his doctrines by reviewers of 
Dumont's book, and added a few supplementary 
remarks on some of the more abstract parts of the 
subject, such a.s the theory of improbability and im- 
possibility. The controversial part of these editorial 
additions was written in a more assuming tone than 
became one so young and inexperienced as I was : 
but indeed I had never contemplated coming forward 
in my own person ; and as an anonymous editor of 
Bentham, I fell into the tone of my author, not think- 
ing it unsuitable to him or to the subject, however 
it might be so to me. My name as editor was put 

I 2 



116 YOUTHFUL TE-DPAGANDISM. 

to tlie book after it was printed, at Mr. Bentham's 
positive desire, wliicL. I in vain attempted to per- 
suade him to foreo-o. 

The time occupied in this editorial work was ex- 
tremely well employed in respect to my own improve- 
ment. The " Rationale of Judicial Evidence " is one 
of the richest in matter of all Bentham's productions. 
The theory ot evidence being in itself one of the 
most important of his subjects, and ramifying into 
most of the others, the book contains, very fully 
developed, a great proportion of all his best thoughts : 
while, among more special things, it comprises the 
most elaborate exposure of the vices and defects of 
English law, as it then was, which is to be found in 
his works ; not confined to the law of evidence, but 
including, by way of illustrative episode, the entire 
procedure or practice of Westminster Hall. The 
direct knowledge, therefore, which I obtained from 
the book, and which was imprinted upon me much 
more thoroughly than it could have been by mere 
reading, was itself no small acquisition. But this 
occupation did for me what might seem less to be 
expected ; it gave a great start to my powers of 
composition. Everything which I wrote subsequently 
to this editorial employment, was markedly superior 
to anything that I had written before it. Bentham's 
later style, as the world knows, was heavy and cum- 
bersome, from the excess of a good quality, the love 



YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISM. 117 

of precision, which made him introduce clause within 
clause into the heart of every sentence, that the 
reader mis^ht receive into his mind all the modifica- 
tions and qualifications simultaneously with the main 
proposition : and the habit grew on him until his 
sentences became, to those not accustomed to them, 
most laborious reading. But his earlier style, that 
of the Fragment on Government, Plan of a Judicial 
Establishment, &c., is a model of liveliness and 
ease combined with fulness of matter, scarcely ever 
surpassed : and of this earlier style there were many 
striking specimens in the manuscripts on Evidence, 
all of which I endeavoured to preserve. So long a 
course of this admirable writing had a considerable 
effect upon my own ; and I added to it by the 
assiduous reading of other writers, both French and 
English, who combined, in a remarkable degree, ease 
with force, such as Goldsmith, Fielding, Pascal, Vol- 
taire, and Courier. Through these influences my 
writing lost the jejuneness of my early compositions ; 
the bones and cartilages began to clothe themselves 
with flesh, and the style became, at times, lively and 
almost light. 

This improvement was first exhibited in a new 
field. Mr. Marshall, of Leeds, father of the present 
generation of Marshalls, the same who was brought 
into Parliament, for Yorkshire, when the representa- 
tion forfeited by Grampound was transferred to it, 



118 YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISM. 

an earnest Parliamentary reformer, and a man of 
large fortune, of which he made a liberal use, had 
been much struck with Bentham's Book of Fallacies : 
and the thought had occurred to him that it would 
be useful to publish annually the Parliamentary 
Debates, not in the chronological order of Hansard, 
but classified according to subjects, and accompanied 
by a commentary pointing out the fallacies of the 
speakers. With this intention, he very naturally 
addressed himself to the editor of the Book of 
Fallacies ; and Bingham, with the assistance of 
Charles Austin, undertook the editorship. The 
work was called " Parliamentary History and 
Be view." Its sale was not sufficient to keep it in 
existence, and it only lasted three years. It excited, 
however, some attention among parliamentary and 
political people. The best strength of the party 
was put forth in it ; and its execution did them much 
more credit than that of the Westminster Beview 
had ever done. Bingham and Charles Austin wrote , 
maich in it ; as did Strutt, Bomilly, and several other 
Liberal lawyers. My fatlier wrote one article in his 
best style ; tlie elder Austin another. Coulson 
wrote one of great merit. It fell to my lot to lead 
off the first number by an article on the principal 
topic of the session (that of 1825), the Catholic 
Association and the Catholic Disabilities. In the 
second number I wrote an elaborate Essay on the 
Commercial Crisis of ^ ^^25 and the Currency Debates. 



YOUTHFUL Pr.GPAGANDISM. 119 

In tlie third I had two articles, one on a mmor 
subject, the other on the llecj'procltj prhiciple in 
commerce, a propos of a celebrated diplomatic corre- 
spondence between Canning and Gallatin. These 
writings were no longer mere reproductions and 
applications of the doctrines I had been taught ; they 
were original thinking, as far as that name can be 
applied to old ideas in new forms and connexions : 
and I do not exceed the truth in saying that there 
was a maturity, and a well-digested character about 
them, which there had not been in any of my 
previous performances. In execution, therefore, they 
were not at all juvenile ; but their subjects have either 
gone by, or have been so much better treated since, 
that they are entirely superseded, and should remain 
buried in the same oblivion with my contributions 
to the first dynasty of the Westminster He view. 

While thus engaged in writing for the public, I 
did not neglect other modes of self-cultivation. It 
was at this time that I learnt German ; beginning it 
on the Hamiltonian method, for which purpose I and 
several of my companions formed a class. For 
several years from this period, our social studies 
assumed a shape which contributed very much to 
my mental progress. The idea occurred to us of 
carrying on, by reading and conversation, a joint 
study of several of the branches of science which 
we wished to be masters of. Y/e assembled to the 
number of a dozen or more. Mr. Grote lent a room 



120 YOUTHFUL PEOPAGANDISM. 

of his house in Threadneeclle Street for the purpose, 
and his partner, Prescott, one of the three original 
members of the Utilitarian Society, made one among 
us. We met two mornings in every week, from 
hah^-past eight till ten, at which hour most of 
us were called off to our daily occupations. Our 
first subject was Political Economy. We chose some 
systematic treatise as our text-book ; my father's 
" Elements" being our first choice. One of us read 
aloud a chapter, or some smaller portion of the book. 
The discussion was then opened, and any one who 
liad an objection, or other remark to make, made it. 
Our rule was to discuss thoroughly every point raised, 
whether great or small, prolonging the discussion 
until all who took part were satisfied with the con- 
clusion they had individually arrived at ; and. to 
follow up every topic of collateral speculation which the 
chapter or the conversation suggested, never leaving it 
until we had untied every knot which we found. We 
repeatedly kept up the discussion of some one point 
for several weeks, thinking intently on it during the 
intervals of our meetings, and contriving solutions 
of the new difiiculties which had risen up in the last 
morning's discussion. When we had finished in this 
way my father's Elements, we went in the same 
manner through llicardo's Principles of Political^ 
Economy, and Bailey's Dissertation on Yalue. Thes( 
close and vigorous discussions were not only im- 



YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISM. 121 

proving in a liigli degree to those wlio took part in 
them, but brought out new views of some topics 
of abstract Pohtical Economy. Tlie theory of Inter- 
national Values which I afterwards pubhshed, 
emanated from these conversations, as did also the 
modified form of Eicardo's theory of Profits, laid 
down in my Essay on Profits and Interest. Those 
among us with whom new speculations chiefly origi- 
nated, were Ellis, Graham, and I ; though others 
gave valuable aid to the discussions, especially 
Prescott and Poebuck, the one by his knowledge, 
the other by his dialectical acuteness. The theories of 
International Values and of Profits were excogitated 
and worked out in about equal proportions by myself 
and Graham : and if our original project had been 
executed, my " Essays on Some Unsettled Questions 
of Political Economy" would have been brought 
out along with some papers of his, under our joint 
names. But when my exposition came to be written, 
I found that I had so much over-estimated my agree- 
ment v/ith him, and he dissented so much from the 
most original of the two Essays, that on Inter- 
national Values, that I was obliged to consider the 
theory as now exclusively mine, and it came out as 
such when published many years later. I may mention 
that among the alterations which my father made in 
revising his Elements for the third edition, several 
were founded on criticisms elicited by these conver- 



122 YOUTHFUL PEOPAGANDISM. 

sations ; and in particular he modified Iiis opinions 
(though not to the extent of our new speculations) 
on both the points to which I have adverted. 

When we had enough of political economy, we 
took up the syllogistic logic in the same manner, 
Grote now joining us. Our first text-book was 
Aldrich, but being disgusted with its superficiality, 
we reprinted one of the most finished among the 
many manuals of the school logic, which my father, 
a great collector of such books, possessed, the Manu- 
ductio ad Logicam of the Jesuit Du Trieu. After 
finishing this, we took up Whately's Logic, then 
first republished from the Encyclopaedia Metropo- 
litana, and finally the '' Computatio sive Logica " of 
Hobbes. These books, dealt with in our manner, 
afforded a wide range for original metaphysical spe- 
culation : and most of what has been done in the 
First Book of my System of Logic, to rationalize 
and correct the princij^les and distinctions of the 
school logicians, and to improve the theory of the 
Import of Propositions, had its origin in these dis- 
cussions ; Graham and I originating most of the 
novelties, while Grote and others furnished an excel- 
lent tribunal or test. From this time I formed the 
project of writing a book on Logic, though on a 
much humbler scale than the one I ultimately exe- 
cuted. 

Having done with Logic, we launched into Analytic 



YOUTHFUL PEOPAGANDISM. 123 

Psychology, and having cliosen Hartley for our text- 
book, we raised Priestley's edition to an extravagant 
price by searcliing through London to furnish each 
of us with a copy. When we had finished Hartley, 
we suspended our meetings ; but my father's Ana- 
lysis of the Mind being published soon after, we 
reassembled ■ for the purpose of reading it. With 
this our exercises ended. I have always darted from 
these conversations my own real inauguration as an 
original and independent thinker. It was also 
through them that I acquired, or very much 
strengthened, a mental habit to which I attribute 
all that I have ever done, or ever shall do, in specula- 
tion ; that of never accepting half-solutions of diffi- 
culties as complete ; never abandoning a puzzle, but 
ao^ain and ao;ain returnino^ to it until it was cleared 
up ; never allowing obscure corners of a subject to 
remain unexplored, because they did not appear im- 
portant ; never thinking that I perfectly understood 
any part of a subject until I understood the whole. 

Our doings from 1825 to 1830 in the way of public 
speaking, filled a considerable place in my life during 
those years, and as they had important effects on my 
development, something ought to be said of them. 

There was for some time in existence a society of 
Owenites, called the Co-operation Society, which 
met for weekly public discussions in Chancery Lane. 
In the early part of 1825, accident brought Hoebuck 



124 YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISM. 

in contact with several of its members, and led to 
his attending one or two of the meetings and taking 
part in the debate in opposition to Owenism. Some 
one of us started the notion of going there in a body 
and having a general battle : and Charles Austin and 
some of his friends who did not usually take part in 
our joint exercises, entered into the project. It was 
carried out by concert with the principal members 
of the Society, themselves nothing loth, as they 
naturally preferred a controversy with opponents to 
a tame discussion among their own body. The ques- 
tion of population was proposed as the subject of 
debate : Charles Austin led the case on our side with 
a brilliant speech, and the fight was kept up by 
adjournment through five or six weekly meetings 
before crowded auditories, including along with the 
members of the Society and their friends, many 
hearers and some speakers from the Inns of Court. 
When this debate was ended, another was com- 
menced on the general merits of Owen's system : and 
the contest altogether lasted about three months. 
It was a lutte coiys a corps between Owenites and 
political economists, whom the Owenites regarded as 
their most inveterate opponents : but it was a per- 
fectly friendly dispute. We who represented poli- 
tical economy, had the same objects in view as they 
had, and took pains to show it ; and the principal 
champion on their side was a very estimable man, 



YOUTHFUL PHOPAGANDISM. 12^ 

witli wliom I was "well acquainted, Mr. William 
Thompson, of Cork, autlior of a book on tlie Distri- 
bution of Wealth, and of an " Appeal " in behalf of 
women against the passage relating to them in my 
father's Essay on Government. Ellis, Roebuck, and 
I took an active part in the debate, and among those 
from the Inns of Court who joined in it, I remember 
Charles Yilliers. The other side obtained also, on 
the population question, very efficient support from 
without. The well-known Gale Jones, then an elderly 
man, made one of his florid speeches ; but the speaker 
with whom I was most struck, though J dissented 
from nearly every word he said, was Thirlwall, the 
historian, since Bishop of St. David's, then a Chan- 
cery barrister, unknown except by a high reputation 
for eloquence acquired at the Cambridge Union 
before the era of Austin and Macaulay. His speech 
was in answer to one of mine. Before he had uttered 
ten sentences, I set him down as the best speaker I 
had ever heard, and I have never since heard any one 
whom I placed above him. 

The great interest of these debates predisposed 
some of those who took part in them, to catch at 
a suggestion thrown out by M'Culloch, the political 
economist, that a Society was wanted in London 
similar to the Speculative Society at Edinburgh, in 
which Brougham, Horner, and others first cultivated 
jmbiic speaking. Our experience at the Co-opera- 



126 YOUTHFUL PHOPAGANDISM. 

tive Society seemed to give cause for being sanguine 
as to the sort of men who might be brought together 
in London for such a purpose. M'Culloch mentioned 
the matter to several young men of influence, to whom 
h^ Yf as then giving private lessons in political economy. 
Some of these entered warmly into the project, 
particularly George Yilliers, afterwards Earl of 
Clarendon. He and his brothers, Hyde and Charles, 
Eomiily, Charles Austin and I, with some others, 
met and agreed on a plan. We determined to meet 
once a fortnight from November to June, at the 
Freemasons' Tavern, and we had soon a fine list 
of members, containing, along with several members 
of Parliament, nearly all the most noted speakers 
of the Cambridge Union and of the Oxford United 
Debating Society. It is curiously illustrative of the 
tendencies of the time, that our principal difficulty in 
recruiting for the Society was to find a sufficient 
number of Tory speakers. Alm^ost all whom we 
could press into the service were Liberals, of difierent 
orders and degrees. Besides those already named, 
we had Macaulay, Thirlwall, Praed, Lord Howick, 
Samuel Wilberforce (afterwards Bishop of Oxford), 
Charles Poulett Thomson (afterwards Lord Syden- 
ham), Edward and Henry Lytton Bulwer, Fonblanque^ 
and many others whom I cannot now recollect, bui 
who made themselves afterwards more or less con- 
spicuous in public or literary life. Nothing could seei 



YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISM. 127 

more promising. But when the time for action drew 
near, and it was necessary to fix on a President, and 
find somebody to open the first debate, none of our 
celebrities would consent to perform either office. Of 
the many who were pressed on the subject, the only 
one who could be prevailed on was a man of whom I 
knew very little, but who had taken high honours at 
Oxford and was said to have acquired a great ora- 
torical reputation there ; who some time afterwards 
became a Tory member of Parliament. He accord- 
ingly was fixed on, both for filhng the President's 
chair and for making the first speech. The impor- 
tant day arrived ; the benches were crowded ; all our 
great speakers were present, to judge of, but not to 
help our efforts. The Oxford orator's speech was a 
complete failure. This threw a damp on the whole 
concern : the speakers who followed were few, and 
none of them did their best : the affair was a com- 
plete fiasco ; and the oratorical celebrities we had 
counted on went away never to return, giving to 
me at least a lesson in knowledge of the world. 
This unexpected breakdown altered my whole relation 
to the project. I had not anticipated taking a promi- 
nent part, or speaking much or often, particularly 
at first, but I now saw that the success of the scheme 
depended on the new men, and I put my shoulder to 
the wheel. I opened the second question, and from 
that time spoke in nearly every debate. It was very 



128 YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISM. 

uphill work for some time. The three Yilliers and 
Eomilly stuck to us for some time longer, but the 
patience of all the founders of the Society was at last 
exhausted, except me and E-oebuck. In the season 
following, 1826-7, things began to mend. We had 
acquired two excellent Tory speakers, Hayward and 
Shee (afterwards Sergeant Shee) : the Radical side 
was reinforced by Charles Buller, Cockburn, and 
others of the second generation of Cambridge Ben- 
thamites ; and with their and other occasional aid, 
and the two Tories as well as Roebuck and me for 
regular speakers, almost every debate was a hataille 
rangee between the "philosophic Radicals" and the 
Tory lawyers ; until our conflicts were talked about, and 
several persons of note and consideration came to hear 
us. This happened still more in the subsequent seasons, 
1828 and 1829, when the Coleridgians, in the persons 
of Maurice and Sterhng, made their appearance in 
the Society as a second Liberal and even Radical 
party, on totally different grounds from Benthamism 
and vehemently opposed to it ; bringing into these 
discussions the general doctrines and modes of thought 
of the European reaction against the philosophy of the 
eighteenth century ; and adding a third and very im- 
portant belligerent party to our contests, which were 
now no bad exponent of the movement of opinion 
among the most cultivated part of the new genera- 
tion. Our debates were very different from those of 



THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 129 

common debating societies, for tliey habitually con- 
sisted of the strongest arguments and most philosophic 
principles which either side was able to produce, 
thrown often into close and serre conftitations of *one 
another. The practice was necessarily very useful to 
us, and eminently so to me. I never, indeed, acquired 
real fluency, and had always a bad and ungraceful 
deb very ; but I could make myself listened to : and 
as I always wrote my speeches when, from the 
feelings involved, or the nature of the ideas to be 
developed, expression seemed important, I greatly 
increased my power of effective writing ; acquiring 
not only an ear for smoothness and rh3rthm, but a 
practical sense for telling sentences, and an immediate 
criterion of their telling property, by their effect on 
a mixed audience. 

The Society, and the preparation for it, together 
with the preparation for the morning conversations 
which were going on simultaneously, occupied the 
greater part of my leisure ; and made me feel it a 
rehef when, in the spring of 1828, I ceased to write 
for the Westminster. The Review had fallen into 
difficulties. Though the sale of the first number 
had been very encouraging, the permanent sale had 
never, I believe, been sufficient to pay the expenses, 
on the scale on which the Review was carried on. 
Those expenses had been considerably, but not suffi- 
ciently, reduced. One of the editors, Southern, had 

K 



130 THE WESTMINSTER BEVIEW, 

resigned ; and several of tlie writers, including my 
father and me, who had been paid like other con- 
tributors for our earlier articles, had latterly written 
without payment. Nevertheless, the original funds 
were nearly or quite exhausted, and if the Review 
was to be continued some new arrangement of its 
affairs had become indispensable. My father and I 
had several conferences with Bowring on the subject. 
We were willing to do our utmost for maintaining 
the Review as an organ of our opinions, but not 
under Bowring s editorship : while the impossibility 
of its any longer supporting a paid editor, afforded a 
ground on which, without aifront to him, we could 
propose to dispense with his services. We and some 
of our friends were prepared to carry on the Review 
as unpaid writers, either finding among ourselves an 
unpaid editor, or sharing the editorship among us. 
But while this negotiation was proceeding with 
Bowring's apparent acquiescence, he was carrying on 
another in a different quarter (with Colonel Perronet 
Thompson), of which we received the first intimation 
in a letter from Bowring as editor, informing us 
merely that an arrangement had been made, and 
proposing to us to write for the next number, with 
promise of payment. We did not dispute Bowring's 
right to bring about, if he could, an arrangement 
more favourable to himself than the one we had 
proposed ; but we thought the concealment which he 



THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 131 

Lad practised towards us, while seemingly entering 
into our own project, an affront : and even had we not 
thought so, we were indisposed to expend any more 
of our time and trouble in attempting to write up 
the Review under his management. Accordingly 
my father excused himself from writing ; though two 
or three years later, on great pressure, he did write 
one more political article. As for me, I positively 
refused. And thus ended my connexion with the 
original Westminster. The last article which I 
wrote in it had cost me more labour than any pre- 
vious ; but it was a labour of love, being a defence 
of the early French Revolutionists against the Tory 
misrepresentations of Sir Walter Scott, in the intro- 
duction to his Life of Napoleon. The number of 
books which I read for this purpose, making notes 
and extracts — even the number I had to buy (for in 
those days there was no public or subscription library 
from which books of reference could be taken home), 
far exceeded the worth of the immediate object; but 
I had at that time a half-formed intention of writing 
a History of the French Revolution ; and though I 
never executed it, my collections afterwards were 
very useful to Carlyle for a similar purpose. 



CHAPTEE V. 



A CRISIS EST MY MENTAL HISTOHY. ONE STAGS 
ONWARD. 

T?OE» some years after this time I wrote very little, 
and nothing regularly, for publication : and 
great were the advantages which 1 derived from the 
intermission. It was of no common importance to 
me, at this period, to be able to digest and mature 
my thoughts for my own mind only, without any 
immediate call for giving them out in print. Had I 
gone on writing, it would have much disturbed the 
important transformation in my opmions and cha- 
racter, which took place during those years. The 
origin of this transformation, or at least the process 
by which I was prepared for it, can only be explained 
by turning some distance back. 

From the winter of 1821, when I first read 
Bentham, and especially from the commencement of 
the Westminster Eeview, I had what might truJy be 
called an object in life ; to be a reformer of the 
world. My conception of my own happiness was 
entirely identified with this object. The personal 
sympatliies I wished for were those of fellow labourers 



A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY. 133 

in this enterprise. I endeavoured to pick up as 
many flowers as I could by the way ; but as a serious 
and permanent personal satisfaction to rest upon, 
my whole reliance was placed on this ; and I was 
accustomed to felicitate myself on the certainty of a 
happy life which I enjoyed, through placing my hap- 
piness in something durable and distant, in which 
some progress might be always making, while it 
could never be exhausted by complete attainment. 
This did very well for several years, during which 
the general improvement going on in the world and 
the idea of myself as engaged with others in strug- 
gling to promote it, seemed enough to fill up an 
interesting and animated existence. But the time 
came when I awakened from this as from a dream. 
It was in the autumn of 1826. I was in a dull state 
of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable 
to ; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excite- 
ment ; one of those moods when what is pleasure at 
other times, becomes insipid or indifferent ; the state, 
I should think, in which converts, to Methodism 
usually are, when smitten by their first " conviction 
of sin." In this frame of mind it occurred to me to 
put the question directly to myself : " Suppose that 
all your objects in life were realized ; that all the 
changes in institutions and opinions which you are 
looking forward to, could be completely efiected a.t 
this very instant : would this be a great joy and 



134 A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY. 

happiness to you T And an irrepressible self-con- 
sciousness distinctly answered, "No!" At tliis my 
heart sank within me : the whole foundation on 
which my life was constructed fell down. AU my 
happiness was to have been found in the continual 
pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, 
and how could there ever again be any interest in 
the means ? I seemed to have nothing left to 
live for. 

At first I hoped that the cloud would pass away 
of itself ; but it did not. A night's sleep, the sove- 
reign remedy for the smaller vexations of life, had no 
effect on it. I awoke to a renewed consciousness of 
the woful fact. I carried it with me into all 
companies, into all occupations. Hardly anything 
had power to cause me even a few minutes' oblivion 
of it. For some months the cloud seemed to grow 
thicker and thicker. The lines in Coleridge's 
'' Dejection" — I was not then acquainted with them — 
exactly describe my case : 

** A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear, 
A drowsy, stifled, unim passioned grief, 
"Which finds no natural outlet or relief 
In word, or sigh, or tear." 

In vain I sought relief from my favourite books ; 
those memorials of past nobleness and greatness 
from which I had always hitherto drawn strength 
and animation. I read them now without feeling, 



A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY. 135 

or with the accustomed feeling minus all its charm ; 
and I became persuaded, that my love of mankind, 
and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself 
out. I sought no comfort by speaking to others of 
what I felt. If I had loved any one sufficiently to 
make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not 
have been in the condition I was. I felt, too, that 
mine was not an interesting, or in any way respect- 
able distress. There was nothing in it to attract 
sympathy. Advice, if I had known where to seek 
it, would have been most precious. The words of 
Macbeth to the physician often occurred to my 
thoughts. But there was no one on whom I could 
build the faintest hope of such assistance. My 
father, to whom it would have been natural to me 
to have recourse in any practical difficulties, was the 
last person to whom, in such a case as this, I looked 
for help. Everything convinced me that he had no 
knowledge of any such mental state as I was suffering 
from, and that even if he could be made to under- 
stand it, he was not the physician who could heal it. 
My education, which was wholly his work, had been 
conducted without any regard to the possibility of 
its ending in this result ; and I saw no use in giving 
him the pain of thinking that his plans had failed, 
when the failure was probably irremediable, and, at 
all events, beyond the j)ower of his remedies. Of 
other friends, I had at that time none to whom I had 



136 A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTOHY. 

any hope of making my condition intelligible. It 
was however abundantly intelligible to myself ; and 
the more I dwelt upon it, the more hopeless it ap- 
peared. 

My course of study had led me to believe, that all 
mental and moral feelings and qualities, whether of a 
good or of a bad kind, were the results of associa- 
tion ; that we love one thing, and hate another, take 
pleasure in one sort of action or contemplation, and 
pain in another sort, through the chnging of pleasur- 
able or painful ideas to those things, from the effect of 
education or of experience. As a corollary from 
this, I had always heard it maintained by my father, 
and was myself convinced, that the object of educa- 
tion should be to form the strongest possible associa- 
tions of the salutary class ; associations of pleasure 
with all things beneficial to the great whole, and of 
pain with all things hurtful to it. This doctrine 
appeared inexpugnable ; but it now seemed to me, 
on retrospect, that my teachers had occupied them- 
selves but superficially with the means of forming 
and keeping up these salutary associations. They 
seemed to have trusted altogether to the old familiar 
instruments, praise and blame, reward and punish- 
ment. Now, I did not doubt that by these means, 
begun early, and applied unremittingly, intense as- 
sociations of pain and pleasure, especially of pain, 
might be created, and might produce desires and 



A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTOEY. 137 

aversions capable of lasting undiminished to tlie end 
of life. But there must always be somet^iing artifi- 
cial and casual in associations thus produced. The 
pains and pleasures thus forcibly associated with 
things, are not connected with them by any natural 
tie ; and it is therefore, I thought, essential to the 
durability of these associations, that they should 
haA^e become so intense and inveterate as to be prac- 
tically indissoluble, before the habitual exercise of 
the power of analysis had commenced. For I now 
saw, or thought I saw, what I had always before 
received with incredulity — that the habit of analysis 
has a tendency to wear away the feelings : as indeed 
it has, when no other mental habit is cultivated, and 
the analysing spirit remains without its natural com- 
plements and correctives. The very excellence of 
analysis (I argued) is that it tends to weaken and 
undermine whatever is the result of prejudice ; that 
it enables us mentally to separate ideas which have 
only casually clung together : and no associations 
whatever could ultimately resist this dissolving force, 
were it not that we owe to analysis our clearest 
knowledge of the permanent sequences in nature; 
the real connexions between Things, not dependent 
on our will and feehngs ; natural laws, by virtue of 
which, in many cases, one thing is inseparable from 
another in fact ; which laws, in proportion as they 
are clearly perceived and imaginatively reahzed, cause 



138 A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY. 

our ideas of things wliich are always joined together 
in Nature, to coliere more and more closely in our 
thoughts. Analytic habits may thus even strengthen 
the associations between causes and effects, means 
and ends, but tend altogether to weaken those which 
are, to speak familiarly, a mere matter of feeling. 
They are therefore (I thought) favourable to prudence 
and clear-sightedness, but a perpetual worm at the 
root both of the passions and of the virtues ; and, 
above all, fearfully undermine all desires, and all 
pleasures, which are the effects of association, that is, 
according to the theory I held, all except the purely 
physical and organic ; of the entire insufficiency of 
which to make life desirable, no one had a stronger con- 
viction than I had. These were the laws of human 
nature, by which, as it seemed to me, I had been 
brought to my present state. All those to whom I 
looked up, were of opinion that the pleasure of sym- 
pathy with human beings, and the feelings which made 
the good of others, and especially of mankind on a 
large scale, the object of existence, were the greatest 
and surest sources of happiness. Of the truth of this I 
was convinced, but to know that a feeling would 
make me happy if I had it, did not give me the 
feeling. My education, I thought, had failed to 
create these feelings in sufficient strength to resist 
the dissolving influence of analysis, while the whole 
course of my intellectual cultivation had made preco- 



A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY. 139 

clous and premature analysis tlie inveterate habit of 
my mind. I was thus, as I said to myself, left 
stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with 
a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail ; 
without any real desire for the ends which I had 
been so carefully fitted out to work for : no delight in 
virtue, or the general good, but also just as little in 
anything else. The fountains of vanity and, ambi- 
tion seemed to have dried up within me, as completely 
as those of benevolence. I had had (as I reflected) 
some gratification of vanity at too early an age : I 
had obtained some distinction, and felt myself of 
some importance, before the desire of distinction and 
of importance had grown into a passion : and little 
as it was which I had attained, yet having been 
attained too early, like all pleasures enjoyed too soon, 
it had made me blase and indifferent to the pursuit. 
Thus neither selfish nor unselfish pleasures were 
pleasures to me. And there seemed no power in 
nature sufficient to begin the formation of my 
character anew, and create in a mind now irre- 
trievably analytic, fresh associations of pleasure with 
any of the objects of human desire. 

These were the thoughts which mingled with the 
dry heavy dejection of the melancholy winter of 
1826-7. During this time I was not incapable of my 
usual occupations. I went on with them mechani- 
cally, by the mere force of habit. I had been so 



140 A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY. 

drilled in a certain sort of mental exercise, that I 
could still carry it on when all the spirit had gone 
out of it. I even composed and spoke several 
speeches at the debating society, how, or with what 
degree of success, I know not. Of four years con- 
tinual speaking at that society, this is the only year 
of which I remember next to nothing. Two lines of 
Coleridge, in whom alone of all writers I have found 
a true description of what I felt, were often in my 
thoughts, not at this time (for I had never read 
them), but in a later period of the same mental 
malady : 

" Work witliont hope draws nectar in a sieve. 
And hope without an object cannot live." 

In all probability my case was by no means so pecii- 
liar as I fancied it, and I doubt not that many others 
have passed through a similar state ; but the idio- 
syncrasies of my education had given to the general 
phenomenon a special character, which made it seem 
the natural effect of causes that it was h?rdly possible 
for time to remove. I frequently asked myself, if I 
could, or if I v^as bound to go on living, when life 
must be passed in this manner. I generally answered 
to myself, that I did not think I could possibly bear 
it beyond a year. When, however, not more than 
half that duration of time had elapsed, a small ray of 
light broke in upon my gloom. I was reading, acci- 
dentally, Marmontel's " Memoires," and came to the 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 141 

passage which relates his father's death, the dis- 
tressed position of the family, and the sudden inspi- 
ration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made 
them feel that he would be everything to them — 
would supply the place of all that they had lost. 
A vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came 
over me, and I was moved to tears. From this 
moment my burden grew lighter. The oppression 
of the thought that all feeling was dead within me, 
was gone. I was no longer hopeless : I was not s\. 
stock or a stone. I had still, it seemed, some of the 
material out of which all worth of character, and all 
capacity for happiness, are made. Relieved from my 
ever present sense of irremediable wretchedness, I 
gradually found that the ordinary incidents of life 
could again give me some pleasure ; that I could 
again find enjoyment, not intense, but sufficient for 
cheerfulness, in sunshine and sky, in books, in con- 
versation, in public affairs ; and that there was, once 
more, excitement, though of a moderate kind, in 
exerting myself for my opinions, and for the public 
good. Thus the cloud gradually drew off, and I 
again enjoyed life : and though I had several relapses, 
some of which lasted many months, I never again 
was as miserable as I had been. 

The experiences of this period had two very 
marked effects on my opinions and character. In 
the first place, they led me to adopt a theory of life, 



142 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

very unlike tliat on which I had before acted, and 
having much in common with what at that time I 
certainly had never heard of, the anti-self-conscious- 
ness theory of Carlyle. I never, indeed, wavered in 
the conviction that happiness is the test of all rules 
of conduct, and the end of life. But I now thought 
that this end was only to be attained by not making 
it the direct end. Those only are happy (I thought) 
who have their minds fixed on some object other 
than their own happiness ; on the happiness of others, 
on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or 
pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an 
ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find 
happiness by the way. The enjoyments of life (such 
was now my theory) are sufficient to make it a 
pleasant thing, when they are taken en passant, with- 
out being made a principal object. Once make them 
so, and they are immediately felt to be insufficient. 
They will not bear a scrutinizing examination. Ask 
yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be 
so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but 
some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let 
your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self- 
interrogation, exjiaust themselves on that ; and if 
otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale 
happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling 
on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling 
it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 143 

questioning. This theory now became the basis of 
my philosophy of life. And I still hold to it as the 
best theory for all those who have but a moderate 
degree of sensibility and of capacity for enjoyment, 
that is, for the great majority of mankind. 

The other important change which my opinions at 
this time underwent, was that I, for the first time, 
gave its proper place, among the prime necessities 
of human well-being, to the internal culture of the 
individual. I ceased to attach almost exclusive 
importance to the ordering of outward circumstances, 
and the training of the human being for speculation 
and for action. 

I had now learnt by experience that the passive 
susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as 
the active capacities, and required to be nourished 
and enriched as well as guided. I did not, for an 
instant, lose sight of, or undervalue, that part of the 
truth which 1 had seen before ; I never turned re- 
creant to intellectual culture, or ceased to consider the 
power and practice of analysis as an essential condi- 
tion both of individual and of social improvement. But 
I thought that it had consequences which required 
to be corrected, by joining other kinds of cultivation 
with it. The maintenance of a due balance among 
the faculties, now seemed to me of primary impor- 
tance. The cultivation of the feelings became one of 
the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical 



144 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

creed. And my thoughts and inclinations turned In 
an increasing degree towards whatever seemed capable 
of being instrumental to that object. 

I now began to find meaning in the things which 
I had read or heard about the importance of poetry 
and art as instruments of human culture. But it 
was some time longer before I began to know this 
by personal experience. The only one of the imagi- 
native arts in which I had from childhood taken great 
pleasure, was music ; the best effect of which (and in 
this it surpasses perhaps every other art) consists in 
exciting enthusiasm ; in winding up to a high pitch 
those feelings of an elevated kind which are already 
in the character, but to which this excitement gives 
a glow and a fervour, which, though transitory at its 
utmost height, is precious for sustaining them at 
other times. This effect of music I had often ex- 
perienced ; but like all my pleasurable susceptibilities 
it was suspended during the gloomy period. I had 
sought relief again and again from this quarter, but 
found none. After the tide had turned, and I was 
in process of recovery, I had been helped forward by 
music, but in a much less elevated manner. I at this 
time first became acquainted with Weber's Oberon, 
and the extreme pleasure which I drew from its 
delicious melodies did me good, by showing me 
a source of pleasure to which I was as susceptible 
as ever. The good, however, was much impaired 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 145 

bj the thought, that the pleasure of music (as is quite 
true of such pleasure as this was, that of mere 
tune) fades with familiarity, and requires either to be 
revived by intermittence, or fed by continual novelty. 
And it is very characteristic both of my then state, 
and of the general tone of my mind at this period of 
my life, that I was seriously tormented by the 
thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations. 
The octave consists only of five tones and two semi- 
tones, which can be put together in only a limited 
number of ways, of which but a small proportion are 
beautiful : most of these, it seemed to me, must have 
been already discovered, and there could not be room 
for a long succession of Mozarts and Webers, to 
strike out, as these had done, entirely new and sur- 
passingly rich veins of musical beauty. This source of 
anxiety may, perhaps, be thought to resemble that of 
the philosophers of Laputa, who feared lest the sun 
should be burnt out. It was, however^ connected 
with the best feature in my character, and the only 
good point to be found in my very unromantie and 
in no way honourable distress. For though my de- 
jection, honestly looked at, could not be calM other 
than egotistical, produced by the ruin, as I thought, 
of my fabric of happiness, yet the destiny of man- 
kind in general was ever in my thoughts, and could 
not be separated from my own. I felt that the ilaw 
in my Hfe, must be a flaw in life itself ; that the 

L 



146 ONE STAGE ONWAED. 

question was, whether, if the reformers of society and 
government could succeed in their objects, and every 
person in the community were free and in a state of 
physical comfort, the pleasures of Hfe, being no 
longer kept up by struggle and privation, would cease 
to be pleasures. And I felt that unless I could see my 
way to some better hope than this for human happi- 
ness in general, my dejection must continue ; but that 
if I could see such an outlet, I should then look on the 
world with pleasure ; content as far as I was myself 
concerned, with any fair share of the general lot. 

This state of my thoughts and feelings made the 
fact of my reading Wordsworth for the first time (in 
the autumn of 1828), an important event in my life. 
I took up the collection of his poems from curiosity, 
with no expectation of mental relief from it, though 
I had before resorted to poetry with that hope. In 
the worst period of my depression, I had read 
through the whole of Byron (then new to me), to try 
whether a poet, whose peculiar department was sup- 
posed to be that of the intenser feelings, could rouse 
any feeling in me. As might be expected, I got no 
good from this reading, but the reverse. The poet's 
state of mind was too like my own. His was the 
lament of a man who had worn out all pleasures, and % 
who seemed to think that life, to all who possess 
the good things of it, must necessarily be the vapid, 
uninteresting thing which I found it. His Harold i 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 147 

and Manfred had the same burden on them which 1 
had ; and I was not in a frame of mind to desire any 
comfort from the vehement sensual passion of his 
Giaours, or the suUenness of his Laras. But while 
Byron was exactly what did not suit my condition, 
Wordsworth was exactly what did. I had looked 
into the Excursion two or three years before, and 
found little in it ; and I should probably have found 
as little, had I read it at this time. But the miscel- 
laneous poems, in the two-volume edition of 1815 
(to which little of value was added in the latter part 
of the author's life), proved to be the precise thing 
for my mental wants at that particular juncture. 

In the first place, these poems addressed them- 
selves powerfully to one of the strongest of my 
pleasurable susceptibilities, the love of rural objects 
and natural scenery ; to which I had been indebted 
not only for much of the pleasure of my life, but 
quite recently for relief from one of my longest re- 
lapses into depression. In this power of rural beauty 
over me, there was a foundation laid for taking plea- 
sure in Wordsworth's poetry ; the more so, as his 
scenery lies mostly among mountains, which, owing 
to my early Pyrenean excursion, were my ideal of 
natural beauty. But Wordsworth would never have 
had any great effect on me, if he had merely placed 
before me beautiful pictures of natural scenery. 
Scott does this still better than Wordsworth, and 

L 2 



148 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

a very second-rate landscape does it more ef- 
fectually than any poet. What made Words- 
worth's poems a medicine for my state of mind, was 
that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, 
but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by 
feeling, under the p.xcitement of beauty. They 
seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which 
I was in quest of In them I seemed to draw from 
a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and ima- 
ginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all 
human beings ; which had no connexion with struggle 
or imperfection, but would be made richer by every 
improvement in the physical or social condition of 
mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would 
be the perennial sources of happiaess, when all the 
greater evils of life shall have been removed. And 
I felt myself at once better and happier as I came 
under their influence. There have certainly been, 
even in our own age, greater poets than Wordsworth ; 
but poetry of deeper and loftier feeliag could not 
have done for me at that time what his did. I 
needed to be made to feel that there was real, per- 
manent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Words- 
worth taught me this, not only without turning 
away from, but with a greatly increased interest in 
the common feelings and common destiny of human 
beings. And the dehght which these poems gave me, 
proved that with culture of this sort, there was 
nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 149 

analysis. At tlie conclusion of the Poems came the 
famous Ode, falsely called Platonic, " Intimations of 
Immortality :" in wliicli, along with more than his 
usual sweetness of melody and rhythm, and along 
with the two passages of grand imagery but bad 
philosophy so often quoted, I found that he too had 
had similar experience to mine ; that he also liad felt 
that the first freshness of youthfal enjoyment of life 
was not lasting ; but that he had sought for compen- 
sation, and found it, in the way in which he was 
now teaching me to find it. The result was that I 
gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual 
depression, and was never again subject to it. I long 
continued to value Wordsworth less according to his 
intrinsic merits, than by the measure of what he had 
done for me. Compared v/ith the greatest poets, he 
may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures, 
possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes. But un- 
poetical natures are precisely those which require 
poetic cultivation. This cultivation Wordsworth is 
much more fitted to give, than poets who are in- 
trinsically far more poets than he. 

It so fell out that the merits of Wordsworth were 
the occasion of my first public declaration of my new 
way of thinking, and separation from those of my 
habitual companions who had not undergone a similar 
change. The person with whom at that time I was 
most in the habit of comparing notes on such subjects 
was Eoebuck, and I induced him to read Words- 



150 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

wortli, in whom he also at first seemed to find mncli 
to admire : but I, like most V/ordsworthians, threw 
mys.elf into strong antagonism to Byron, both as a poet 
and as to his influence on the character. Roebuck, 
all whose instincts were those of action and struggle, 
had, on the contrary, a strong relish and great admi- 
ration of Byron, whose writings he regarded as the 
poetry of human life, while Wordsworth's, according 
to him, was that of flowers and butterflies. We 
agreed to have the fight out at our Debating Society, 
where we accordingly discussed for two evenings the 
comparative merits of Byron and Wordsworth, pro- 
pounding and illustrating by long recitations our 
respective theories of poetry : Sterling also, in a 
brilliant speech, putting forward his particular 
theory. This was the first debate on any weighty 
subject in which Boebuck and I had been on opposite 
sides. The schism between us widened from this 
time more and more, though we continued for some 
years longer to be companions. In the beginning, 
our chief divergence related to the cultivation of 
the feelings. Boebuck was in many respects very 
difierent from the vulgar notion of a Benthamite or 
Utilitarian. He was a lover of poetry and of most 
of the fine arts. He took great pleasure in music, in 
dramatic performances, especially in painting, and 
himself drew and designed landscapes with great 
facility and beauty. But he never could be made to 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 151 

see tliat these tilings have any value as aids in the 
formation of cliaracter. Personally, instead of being, 
as Benthamites are supposed to be, void of feeling, 
he had very quick and strong sensibilities. But, like 
most Englishmen who have feelings, he found his 
feelings stand very much in his way. He was much 
more susceptible to the painful sympathies than to 
the pleasurable, and looking for his happiness else- 
where, he wished that his feelings should be deadened 
rather than quickened. And, in truth, the English 
character, and English social circumstances, make it 
so seldom possible to derive happiness from the exer- 
cise of the sym_pathies, that it is not wonderful if 
they count for little in an Englishman's scheme of 
life. In most other countries the paramount impor- 
tance of the sympathies as a constituent of individual 
happiness is an axiom, taken for granted rather than 
needing any formal statement ; but most English 
thinkers almost seem to regard them as necessary 
evils, required for keeping men's actions benevolent 
and compassionate. Boebuck was, or appeared to be, 
this kind of Englishman. He saw little good in any 
cultivation of the feelings, and none at all m culti- 
vating them through the imagination, which he 
thought was only cultivating illusions. It was in 
vain I urged on him that the imaginative emotion 
v/hich an idea, when vividly conceived, excnns 
in us, is not an illusion but a fact, as real as any 



152 ONE STAGE ONWAED. 

of the other qualities of objects; and far from 
implying anything erroneous and delusive in our 
mental apprehension of the object, is quite consistent 
with the most accurate knowledge and most perfect 
practical recognition of all its physical and intellectual, 
laws and relations. The intensest feeling of the 
beauty of a cloud lighted by the setting sun, is no 
hindrance to my knowing that the cloud is vapour 
of water, subject to all the laws of vapours in a 
state of suspension ; and I am just as likely to allow 
for, and act on, these physical laws whenever there is 
occasion to do so, as if I had been incapable of per- 
ceiving any distinction between beauty and ugliness. 

While my intimacy with Roebuck diminished, I 
fell more and more into friendly iutercourse with our 
Coleridgian adversaries in the Society, Frederick 
Maurice and John Sterling, both subsequently so 
well known, the former by his writings, the latter 
through the biographies by Hare and Carlyle. Of 
these two friends, Maurice was the thinker. Sterling 
the orator, and impassioned expositor of thoughts 
which, at this period, were almost entirely formed for 
him by Maurice. 

With Maurice I had for some time been acquainted 
through Eyton Tooke, who had known him at Cam- 
bridge, and although my discussions with him were 
almost always disputes, I had carried away from 
them much that helped to build up my new fabric of 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 153 

thought, in the same way as I was deriving much 
from Coleridge, and from the writings of Goethe and 
other German authors which I read during these 
years. I have so deep a respect for Maurice's character 
and purposes, as well as for his great mental gifts, 
that it is with some unwillingness I say anything 
which may seem to place him on a less high eminence 
than I would gladly be able to accord to him. But 
I have always thought that there was more intellec- 
tual power wasted in Maurice than in any other of 
my contemporaries. Few of them certainly have had 
so much to waste. Great powers of generalization, 
rare ingenuity and subtlety, and a wide perception 
of important and unobvious truths, served him not 
for putting something better into the place of the 
worthless heap of received opinions on the great sub- 
jects of thought, but for proving to his own mind that 
the Church of England had known everything from 
the first, and that all the truths on the ground of 
which the Church and orthodoxy have been attacked 
(many of which he saw as clearly as any one) are not 
only consistent with the Thirty-nine Articles, but are 
better understood and expressed in those Articles 
than by any one who rejects them. I have never 
been able to find any other explanation of this, than by 
attributing it to that timidity of conscience, combined 
with original sensitiveness . of temperament, which 
has so often driven highly gifted men into Eomanism 



154 ONE STAGE ONWAKD. 

from the need of a firmer support than they can find 
in the independent conclusions of their own judgment. 
Any more vulgar kind of timidity no one who knew 
Maurice would ever think of imputing to him, even 
if he had not given public proof of his freedom from 
it, by his ultimate collision vdth some of the opinions 
commonly regarded as orthodox, and by his noble 
origination of the Christian Socialist movement. The 
nearest parallel to him, in a moral point of view, is 
Coleridge, to whom, in merely intellectual power, 
apart from poetical genius, I think him decidedly 
superior. At this time, however, he might be 
described as a disciple of Coleridge, and Sterling as a 
disciple of Coleridge and of him. The modifications 
which were taking place in my old opinions gave me 
some points of contact with them ; and both Maurice 
and Sterling were of considerable use to my develop- 
ment. With Sterling I soon became very intimate, 
and was more attached to him than I have ever been 
to any other man. He was indeed one of the most 
loveable of men. His frank, cordial, affectionate, and 
expansive character ; a love of truth alike conspicuous 
in the highest things and the humblest ; a generous 
and ardent nature which threw itself with impetuosity 
into the opinions it adopted, but was as eager to do 
justice to the doctrines and the men it was opposed 
to, as to make war on what it thought their errors ; 
and an equal devotion to the two cardinal points of 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 155 

Liberty and Duty, formed a combination of qualities 
as attractive to me, as to all others who knew him as 
well as I did. With his open mind and heart, he found 
no difficulty in joining hands with me across the gulf 
which as yet divided our opinions. He told me how 
he and others had looked upon me (from hearsay in- 
formation), as a " made " or manufactured man, having 
had a certain impress of opinion stamped on me which 
I could only reproduce ; and what a change took place 
in his feelings when he found, in the discussion on 
Wordsworth and Byron, that Wordsworth, and all 
which that name implies, *' belonged " to me as much 
as to him and his friends. The failure of his health 
soon scattered all his plans of life, and compelled him 
to hve at a distance from London, so that after the 
first year or two of our acquaintance, we only saw each 
other at distant intervals. But (as he said himself in 
one of his letters to Carlyle) when we did meet it 
was like brothers. Though he was never, in the full 
sense of the word, a profound thinker, his openness of 
mind, and the moral courage in which he greatly 
surpassed Maurice, made him outgrow the dominion 
which Maurice and Coleridge had once exercised 
over his intellect ; though he retained to the last a 
great but discriminating admiration of both, and 
towards Maurice a warm affection. Except in that 
short and transitory phasis of his life, during which 
he made the mistake of becoming a clergyman, his 



156 ONE STAGE ONWAP.D. 

mind was ever progressive : and the advance lie 
always seemed to liave made when I saw him after 
an interval, made me apply to him what Goethe said 
of Schiller, " er hatte eine furchtliche Fortschitei- 
tung." He and I started from intellectual points 
almost as wide apart as the poles, but the distance 
between us was always diminishing : if I made steps 
towards some of his opinions, he, during his short life, 
was constantly approximating more and more to several 
of mine : and if he had lived, and had health and 
vigour to prosecute his ever assiduous self-culture, 
there is no knowing how much further this sponta- 
neous assimilation might have proceeded. 

After 1829 I withdrew from attendance on the 
Debating Society. I had had enough of speech- 
making, and was glad to carry on my private studies 
and meditations without any immediate call for out- 
ward assertion of their results. I found the fabric of 
my old and taught opinions giving way in many 
fresh places, and I never allowed it to fall to pieces, 
but was incessantly occupied in weaving it anew. I 
never, in the course of my transition, was content to 
remain, for ever so short a time, confused and unset- 
tled. When I had taken in any new idea, I could 
not rest till I had adjusted its relation to my old 
opinions, and ascertained exactly how far its effect 
ought to extend in modifying or superseding them. 

The conflicts which I had so often had to sustain in 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 157 

defending tlie theory of government laid down in 
Benthams and my fathers writings, and the ac- 
quaintance I had obtained with other schools of 
poHtical thinking, made me aware of many things 
which that doctrine, professing to be a theory of 
government in general, ought to have made room for, 
and did not. But these things, as yet, remained with 
me rather as corrections to be made in applying the 
theory to practice, than as defects in the theory. I 
felt that politics could not be a science 'of specific 
experience ; and that the accusations against the 
Benthamic theory of being a theory, of proceeding a 
priorihj way of general reasoning, instead of Baconian 
experiment, showed complete ignorance of Bacon's 
principles, and of the necessary conditions of experi- 
mental investigation. At this juncture appeared in 
the Edinburgh Review, Macaulay's famous attack on 
my father's Essay on Government. This gave me 
much to think about. I saw that Macaulay's con- 
ception of the logic of politics was erroneous ; that 
he stood up for the empirical mode of treating poli- 
tical phenomena, against the philosophical ; that even 
in physical science his notions of philosophizing 
might have recognised Kepler, but would have ex- 
cluded Newton and Laplace. But I could not help 
feeling, that though the tone was unbecoming (an 
error for which the writer, at a later period, made the 
most ample and honourable amends), there was truth 



153 oi;e stage onward. 

in several of liis strictures on my father s treatment 
of the subject ; that my father's premises were rea^lly 
too narrow, and included but a small number of 
the general truths, on which, in politics, the important 
consequences depend. Identity of interest between 
the governing body and the community at large, is 
not, in any practical sense which can be attached to 
it, the only thing on which good government 
depends ; neither can this identity of interest be 
secured by the mere conditions of election. I was 
not at all satisfied with the mode in which my father 
met the criticisms of Macaulay. He did not, as I 
thought he ought to have done, justify himself by 
saying, "1 was not writing a scientific treatise on 
politics, I was writing an argument for parliamen- 
tary reform." He treated Macaulay 's argument as 
simply irrational ; an attack upon the reasoning 
faculty ; an example of the saying of Hobbes, that 
when reason is against a man, a man will be against 
reason. This made me think that there was 
really something more fundamentally erroneous in 
my father's conception of philosophical method, as 
applicable to politics, than I had hitherto supposed 
there was. But I did not at first see clearly what 
the error might be. At last it flashed upon me all at 
once in the course of other studies. In the early 
part of 1830 I had begun to put on paper the ideas 
on Logic (chiefly on the distinctions among Terms, 



ONE STAGE ONWARD, l59 

and tlie Import of Propositions) wHch had been sug- 
gested and in part worked out in the morning con- 
versations already spoken of. Having secured these 
tPioughts from being lost, I pushed on into the other 
parts of the subject, to try whether I could do any- 
thing further towards clearing up the theory of logic 
generally. I grappled at once with the problem of 
Induction, postponing that of Reasoning, on the 
ground that it is necessary to obtain premises before 
we can reason from them. Now, Induction is mainly 
a process for finding the causes of effects : and in 
attempting to fathom the mode of tracing causes and 
effects in physical science, I soon saw that in the 
more perfect of the sciences, we ascend, by generaliza- 
tion from particulars, to the tendencies of causes 
considered singly, and then reason downward from 
those separate tendencies, to the effect of the same 
causes when combined. I then asked myself, what 
is the ultimate analysis of this deductive process ; 
the common theory of the syllogism evidently throw- 
ing no light upon it. My practice (learnt from 
Hobbes and my father) being to study abstract prin- 
ciples by means of the best concrete instances I could 
find, the Composition of Forces, in dynamics, occurred 
to me as the most complete example of the logical 
process I was investigating. On examining, accord- 
ingly, what the mind does when it applies the prin- 
ciple of the Composition of Forces, I found that it 



160 toE STAGE ONWABD. 

performs a simple act of addition. It adds tlie sepa- 
rate effect of the one force to the separate effect of 
the other, and puts down the sum of these separate 
effects as the joint effect. But is this a legitimate 
process ^ In dynamics, and in all the mathematical 
branches of physics, it is ; but in some other cases, as 
in chemistry, it is not ; and I then recoUecteci that 
something not unlike this was pointed out as one of 
the distinctions between chemical and mechanical 
phenomena, in the introduction to that favourite of 
my boyhood, Thompson's System of Chemistry. 
This distinction at once made my mind clear as to 
what was perplexing me in respect to the philosophy 
of politics. I now saw, that a science is either deduc- 
tive or experimental, according as, in the province it 
deals with, the effects of causes when conjoined, are 
or are not the sums of the effects which the same 
causes produce when separate. It followed that 
politics must be a deductive science. It thus ap- 
peared, that both Macaulay and my father were 
wrong ; the one in assimilating the method of philoso- 
phizing in politics to the purely experimental method 
of chemistry ; while the other, though right in adopting 
a deductive method, had made a wrong selection of 
one, having taken as the type of deduction, not the 
appropriate process, that of the deductive branches 
of natural philosophy, but the inappropriate one of 
pure geometry, which, not being a science of causa- 
tion at all, does not require or admit of any sum- 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 161 

mog-up of effects. A foundation was tlius laid in 
my thoughts for the principal chapters of what I 
afterwards published on the Logic of the Moral 
Sciences ; and my new position in respect to my old 
political creed, now became perfectly definite. 

If I am asked, what system of political philosophy 
I substituted for that which, as a philosophy, I had 
abandoned, I answer. No system : only a conviction 
that the true system was something much more com- 
plex and many-sided than I had previously had any 
idea of, and that its office was to supply, not a set of 
mode] institutions, but principles from which the in- 
stitutions suitable to any given circumstances might be 
deduced. The influences of European, that is to say, 
Continental, thought, and especially those of the 
reaction of the nineteenth century against the 
eighteenth, were now streaming in upon me. They 
came from various quarters : from the writings of Cole- 
ridge, which I had begun to read with interest even 
before the change in my opinions ; from theColeridgians 
with whom I was in personal intercourse ; from what I 
had read of Goethe ; from Carlyle's early articles in 
the Edinburgh and Foreign Reviews, though for a 
long time I saw nothing in these (as my father saw 
nothing in them to the last) but insane rhapsody. 
From these sources, and from the acquaintance I kept 
up with the French literature of the time, I derived, 
among other ideas which the general turning upside 

M 



162 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

down of tlie opinions of European thinkers Iiad 
brought uppermost, these in particular : That the 
human mind has a certain order of possible progress, 
in which some things must precede others, an order 
which governments and public instructors can modify 
to some, but not to an unlimited extent : that all ques- 
tions of political institutions are relative, not absolute, 
and that different stages of human progress not only 
will have, but ought to have, different institutions : 
that government is always either in the hands, or 
passing into the hands, of whatever is the strongest 
power in society, and that what this power is, does 
not depend on institutions, but institutions on it : 
that any general theory or philosophy of politics 
supposes a previous theory of human progress, and 
that this is the same thing with a philosophy of 
history. These opinions, true in the main, were held 
in an exaggerated and violent manner by the thinkers 
with whom I was now most accustomed to compare 
notes, and who, as usiial with a reaction, ignored 
that half of the truth which the thinkers of the 
eighteenth century saw. But though, at one period 
of my progress, I for some time undervalued that 
great century, I never joined in the reaction against 
it, but kept as firm hold of one side of the truth as I 
took of the other. The fight between the nineteenth 
century and the eighteenth always reminded me of 
the battle about the shield, one side of which was white 



I 



ONE STAGE OliYiAUB. 1G3 

and tlie other black. I marvelled at the blind rao-e 
with which the combatants rushed against one another. 
I applied to. them, and to Coleridge himself, many of 
Coleridge's sayings about half truths ; and Goethe's 
device, " many-sidedness," was one which I would 
most willingly, at this period, have taken for mine. 

Tlie writers by whom, more than by any others, a 
new mode of political thinking was brought home to 
me, were those of the St. Simonian school in 
France. In 1829 and 1830 I became acquainted 
with some of their writings. They were then only 
in the earlier stages of their speculations. They had 
not yet dressed out their philosophy as a religion, 
nor had they organized their scheme of Socialism. 
They were just beginning to question the principle 
of hereditary property. I was by no means prepared 
to go with them even this lengtli ; but I was greatly 
struck Avith the connected view which they for the 
first time presented to me, of the natural order of 
human progress: and especially witli their division of 
all history ii)to organic periods and critical periods. 
During the organic periods (they said) mankind 
accept with firm conviction some positive creed, claim- 
ing jurisdiction over all their actions, and containing 
more or less of truth and adaptation to the needs of 
humanity. Under its influence they make ail the 
progress compatible with the creed, and finally out- 
groAV it ; when a period follows of criticism and nega- 

M 2 



164 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

tion, in wliich mankind lose tlieir old convictions 
without acquiring any new ones, of a general or 
authoritative character, except the conviction that 
the old are false. The period of Greek and Roman 
polytheism, so long as really believed in by instructed 
Greeks and Romans, was an organic period, suc- 
ceeded by the critical or sceptical period of the 
Greek philosophers. Another organic period came 
in with Christianity. The corresponding critical 
period began with the Beformation, has lasted ever 
since, still lasts, and cannot altogether cease until a 
new organic period has been inaugurated by the 
triumph of a yet more advanced creed. These ideas, 
I knew, were not peculiar to the St. Simonians ; on 
the contrary, they were the general property of 
Europe, or at least of Germany. and France, but they 
had never, to my knowledge, been so completely 
systematized as by these writers, nor the distinguish- 
ing characteristics of a critical period so powerfully 
set forth ; for I was not then acquainted with Fichte's 
Lectures on " The Characteristics of the Present 
Age." In Carlyle, indeed, I found bitter denuncia- 
tions of an " age of unbelief," and of the present age 
as such, which I, like most people at that time, sup- 
posed to be passionate protests in favour of the old 
modes of belief But all tliat was true in these 
denunciations, I thought that I found more calmly 
and philosophically stated by the St. Simonians. 



. ONE STAGE ON WARD. 165 

Among tlieir publications, too, there was one wMch 
seemed to me far superior to the rest ; in which the 
general idea was matured into something much more 
definite and instructive. This was an early woik of 
Auguste Comte, who then called himself, and even 
announced himself in tl^e title-page as, a pupil of 
Saint Simon. In this tract M. Comte first put forth 
the doctrine, which he afterwards so copiously illus- 
•trated, of the natural succession of three stages in 
every department of human knowledge : first, the 
theological, next the metaphysical, and lastly, the 
positive stage ; and contended, that social science 
must be subject to the same law; that the feudal 
and Catholic system was the concluding phasis of the 
theological state of the social science. Protestantism 
the commencement, and the doctrines of the French 
^Revolution the consummation, of the metaphysical ; 
and that its positive state was yet to come. This 
doctrine harmonized well with my existing notions, 
to which it seemed to give a scientific shape. I 
already regarded the methods of physical science as 
the proper models for political. But the chief benefit 
which I derived at this time from the trams of 
thought suggested by the St. Simonians and by 
Comte, was, that I obtained a clearer conception 
than ever before of the peculiarities of an era of 
transition in opinion, and ceased to mistake the 
moral and intellectual characteristics of such an era. 



166 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

for the normal attributes of humanity. I looked 
forward, through the present age of loud disputes 
but generally weak convictions, to a future which 
shall unite the best qualities of the critical with the 
best qualities of the organic periods ; unchecked 
liberty of thought, unbounded freedom of individual 
action in all modes not hurtful to others ; but also, 
convictions as to what is right and wrong, useful and 
pernicious, deeply engraven on the feelings by early 
education and general unanimity of sentiment, and 
so firmly grounded in reason and in the true exi- 
gencies of life, that they shall not, lil^e all former and 
present creeds, religious, ethical, and political, require 
to be periodically thrown off and replaced by others. 
M. Comte soon left the St. Simonians, and I lost 
sight of him and his writings for a number of years. 
But the St. Simonians I continued to cultivate. I was 
kept au courant of their progress by one of their most 
enthusiastic disciples, M. Gustave d'Eichthal, who 
about that time passed a considerable interval in 
England. I was introduced to their chiefs, Bazard and 
Enfantin, in 1 830; and as long as their public teachings 
and proselytism continued, I read nearly everything 
they wrote. Their criticisms on the common doctrines 
of Liberalism seemed to me full of important truth ; 
and it was partly by their writings that my eyes 
were opened to the very limited and temporary value 
of the old political economy, wliich assumes private 



ONE STAGE ONWARD.. 1G7 

property and inlieritance as indefeasible facts, and 
freedom of production and exchange as the dernier 
mot of social improvement. The scheme gradually 
unfolded by the St. Simonians, under which the 
labour and capital of society would be managed for the 
general account of the community, every individual 
being required to take a share ol labour, either as 
thinker, teacher, artist, or producer, all being classed 
according to their capacity, and remunerated according 
to their work, appeared to me a far superior descrip- 
tion of Socialism to Owen s. Their aim seemed to me 
desirable and rational, however their means might 
be inefficacious ; and though I neither believed in the 
practicability, nor in the beneficial operation of their 
social machinery, I felt that the proclamation of 
such an ideal of human society could not but tend to 
give a beneficial direction to the efforts of others to 
bring society, as at present constituted, nearer to some 
ideal standard. I honoured them most of all for what 
they have been most cried down for — the boldness and 
freedom from prejudice with which they treated the 
subject of family, the most important of any, and 
needing more fundamental alterations than remain to 
be made in any other great social institution, but on 
which scarcely any reformer has the courage to touch. 
In proclaiming the perfect equality of men and women, 
and an entirely new order of things in regard to their 
relations with one another, the St. Simonians, in 



1G8 c:te stage onward. 

camrnon with Owen and Fourier, liave entitled 
themselves to the grateful remembrance of future 
generations. 

In giving an account of this period of my life, I 
have only specified such of my new impressions as 
appeared to me, both at the time and since, to be a 
kind of turning points, marking a definite progress in 
my mode of thought. But these few selected points 
give a very insufficient idea of the quantity of think- 
ing which I carried on respecting a host of subjects 
di'iring these years of transition. Much of this, it is 
true, consisted in rediscovering things known to all 
the world, which I had previously disbelieved, or 
disregarded. But the rediscovery was to me a 
discovery, giving me plenary possession of the truths, 
not as traditional platitudes, but fresh from their 
source : and it seldom failed to place them in some 
new light, by which they were reconciled with, and 
seemed to confirm while they modified, the truths 
less generally known which lay in my early opinions, 
and in no essential part of which I at any time 
wavered. All my new thinking only laid the foun- 
dation of these more deeply and strongly, while it 
often removed misapprehension and confusion of 
ideas which had perverted their effect. For example, 
during the later returns of my dejection, the doctrine 
of what is called Philosophical Necessity weighed on 
my existence like an incubus. I felt as if I was 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 1G9 

scientificallj proved to be the helpless slave O-^ ante- 
cedent circumstances ; as if mj character and that of 
all others had been formed for us by agencies beyond 
onr control, and was wholly out of our own power. I 
often said to myself, what a relief it would be if I 
could disbelieve the doctrine of the formation of 
character by circumstances ; and remembermg the 
wish of Fox respecting the doctrine of resistance to ■■ 
governments,that it might never be forgotten by kings, 
nor remembered by subjects, I said that it would be a 
blessing if the doctrine of necessity could be believed 
by all quoad the characters of others, ^nd disbelieved 
in regard to their own. I pondered painfully on the 
subject, till gradually I saw light through it. I 
perceived, that the word Necessity, as a name for the 
doctrine of Cause and Effect applied to human action, 
carried with it a misleading association ; and that 
this association was the operative force in the depress- 
ing and paralysing influence which I had experienced : 
I saw that though our character is formed by circum- 
stances, our own desires can do much to shape those 
circumstances ; and that what is really inspiriting and 
ennobling in the doctrine of freewill, is the conviction 
that we have real power over the formation of our 
own character ; that our will, by influencing some of 
our circumstances, can modify our future habits or 
capabilities of willing. All this was entirely con- 
sistent with the doctrine of cu*cumstances, or rather, 



170 ONE STAGE ONWAllD. 

was tliat doctrine itsel!!*, properly understood. From 
that time I drew in my own mind, a clear distinction 
between tlie doctrine of circumstances, and Fatalism ; 
discarding altogether the misleading word Necessity. 
The theory, which I now for the first time rightly 
apprehended, ceased altogether to be discouraging, 
and besides the relief to my spirits, I no longer 
%suffered under the burden, so heavy to one who 
aims at being a reformer in opinions, of thinking one 
doctrine true, and the contrary doctrine morally 
beneficial. The train of thought which had extricated 
me from this dilemma, seemed to me, in after years, 
fitted to render a similar service to others ; and it 
now forms the chapter on Liberty and Necessity in 
the concluding Book of my System of Logic. 

Again, in politics, though I no longer accepted the 
doctrine of the Essay on Government as a scientific 
theory ; though I ceased to consider representative 
democracy as an absolute principle, and regarded it 
as a question of time, place, and circumstance ; though 
I now looked upon the choice of political institutions 
as a moral and educational question more than one 
of material interests, thinking that it ought to be 
decided mainly by the consideration, what great im- 
provement in life and culture stands next in order for 
the people concerned, as the condition of their 
further pre gross, and what institutions are most 
likely to promote that; neverthekss, this change in 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 171 

the premises of my political philosophy did not alter 
my practical political creed as to the requirements of 
my own time and country. I was as much as ever a 
Radical and Democrat for Europe, and especially for 
England. I thought the predominance of the aris- 
tocratic classes, the noble and the rich, in the English 
constitution, an evil worth any struggle to get rid of ; 
not on account of taxes, or any such comparatively 
small inconvenience, but as the great demorahzing 
agency in the country. Demoralizing, first, because 
it made the conduct of the Government an example 
of gross public immorality, through the predominance 
of private over public interests in the State, and the 
abuse of the powers of legislation for the advantage 
of classes. Secondly, and in a still greater degree, 
because the respect of the multitude always attaching 
itself principally to that which, in the existing state 
of society, is the chief passport to power ; and under 
English institutions, riches, hereditary or acquired, 
being the almost exclusive source of political im- 
portance ; riches, and the signs of riches, were almost 
the only things really respected, and the life of the 
people was mainly devoted to the pursuit of them, 
I thought, that while the higher and richer classes 
held the power of government, the instruction 
and improvement of the mass of the people were 
contrary to the self-interest of those classes, because 
tending to render the people more powerful for 



172 ONE STAGE ONWAED. 

throwing off the yoke : but if the democracy obtained 
a large, and perhaps the principal share, in the 
governing power, it would become the interest of the 
opulent classes to promote their education, in order 
to ward off really mischievous errors, and especially 
those which would lead to unjust violations of 
property. On these grounds I was not only as 
ardent as ever for democratic institutions, but 
earnestly hoped that Owenite, St. Simonian, and 
all other anti-property doctrines might spread widely 
among the poorer classes ; not that I thought those 
doctrines true, or desired that they should be acted 
on, but in order that the higher classes might be 
made to see that they had more to fear from the poor 
when uneducated, than when educated. 

In this frame of mind the French Eevolution of 
July found me. It roused my utmost enthusiasm, and 
gave me, as it were, a new existence. I went at once 
to Paris, was introduced to Lafayette, and laid the 
groundwork of the intercourse I afterwards kept up 
with several of the active chiefs of the extreme 
popular party. After my return I entered warmly, as 
a writer, into the political discussions of the time ; 
which soon became still more exciting, by the coming 
in of Lord Grey's Ministry, and the proposing of the 
Reform Bill. For the next few years I v/rote 
copiously in newspapers. It was about this time 
that Fonblanque, who had for some time written tLo 



ONE STAGE ONWAED. 175 

political articles in tlie Examiner, became tlie pro- 
prietor and editor of the paper. It is not forgotten 
with what verve and talent, as well as fine wit, he 
carried it on, during the whole period of Lord Grey's 
Ministry, and v/hat importance it assumed as the 
principal representative, in the newspaper press, of 
Radical opmions. The distinguishing character of 
the paper was given to it entirely by his own articles, 
which formed at least three-fourths of all the original 
writing contained in it : but of the remaining fourth 
I contributed during those years a much larger share 
than any one else. I wrote nearly all the articles on 
French subjects, including a weekly summary of 
French politics, . often extending to considerable 
length ; together with many leading articles on 
general politics, commercial and financial legislation, 
and any miscellaneous subjects in which I felt in- 
terested, and which v/ere suitable to the paper, 
including occasional reviews of books. Mere news- 
paper articles on the occurrences or questions of the 
moment, gave no opportunity for the development of 
any general mode of thought ; but I attempted, in 
the beginning of 1831, to embody in a series of 
articles, headed " The Spirit of the Age," some of 
my new ophiions, and especially to point out in the 
character of the present age, the anomalies and 
evils characteristic of the transition from a system 
of opinions which liad worn out, to another onlj in 



174 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

process of being formed. These articles were, I fancy, 
lumbering in style-, and not lively or striking enougli 
to be. at any time, acceptable to newspaper readers ; 
but bad they been far more attractive, still, at that 
particular moment, when great political changes 
were impending, and engrossing all minds, these dis- 
cussions were ill-timed, and missed fire altogether. 
The only effect which I know to have been produced 
by them, was that Carlyle, then living in a secluded 
part of Scotland, read them in his solitude, and 
saying to himself (as he afterv/ards told me) " Here is 
a new Mystic," inquired on coming to London that 
autumn respecting their authorship ; an inquiry 
which was the immediate cause of our becoming 
personally acquainted. 

I have already mentioned Carlyle's earlier writings 
as one of the channels through which I received the 
influences which enlarged my early narrow creed ; 
but I do not think that those writings, by themselves, 
would ever have had any effect on my opinions. 
What truths they contained, though of the verj kind 
which I was already receiving from other quarters, 
were presented in a form and vesture less suited 
than any other to give them access to a mind trained 
as mine had been. They seemed a haze of poetry 
and German metaphysics, in which almost the oidy 
clear thing was a strong animosity to most of the 
opinions \^•hich were the basis of my mode of tli ought ; 



ONE STAGE ONWAED. 175 

religious scepticism, utilitarianism, tlie doctrine of 
circumstances, and tlie attaching any importance to 
democracy, logic, or political economy. Instead of 
my having been taught anything, in the first instance,^ 
by Carlyle, it was only in proportion as I came to see 
the same truths through media more suited to my 
mental constitution, that I recognised them in his 
writings. Then, indeed, the wonderful power with 
which he put them forth made a deep impression 
upon me, and I was during a long period one of his 
most fervent admirers ; but the good his writings did 
me, was not as philosophy to instruct, but as poetry 
to animate. Even at the time when our acquaintance 
commenced, I was not sufficiently advanced in my 
new modes of thought, to appreciate him fully ; a 
proof of which is, that on his showing me the manu- 
script of Sartor Resartus, his best and greatest work, 
which he had just then finished, I made little of it ; 
though when it came out about two years a^fterwards 
in Eraser's Magazine I read it with enthusiastic 
admiration and the keenest delight. I did not seek 
and cultivate Carlyle less on account of the funda- 
mental differences in our philosphy. He soon found 
out that I was not "another mystic," and when for 
the sake of my own integrity I wrote to him a 
distinct profession of all those of my opinions which 
I knew he most disliked, he replied that the chief 
difference between us was that I " was as yet con- 



176 ONE STAGE ONWAED. 

sciously notMng of a mystic. " I do not know at wliat 
period he gave up the expectation that I was destined 
to become one ; but though both his and my opinionti 
■' underwent in subsequent years considerable changes, 
we never approached much nearer to each other's 
modes of thought than we were in the first years of 
our acquaintance. I did not, however, deem myself a 
competent judge of Carlyle. I felt that he was a 
poet, and that I was not ; that he was a man of 
intuition, which I was not ; and that as such, he not 
only saw many things long before me, which I could 
only when they were pointed out to me, hobble after 
and prove, but that it was highly probable he could 
see many things which were not visible to me even 
after they were pointed out. I knew that I could 
not see round him, and could never be certain that I 
saw over him ; and I never presumed to judge him 
with any definiteness, until he was interpreted to me 
by one greatly the superior of us both — who was more 
a poet than he, and more a thinker than I — whose own 
mind and nature included his, and infinitely more. 

Among the persons of intellect whom I had known 
of old, the one with whom I had now most points of 
agreement was the elder Austin. I have mentioned 
that he always set himself in opposition to our early 
sectarianism ; and latterly he had, like myself, come 
under new influences. Having been appointed 
Professor of Jurisprudence in the London University 



ONE STAGE ONWAKD. 177 

(now University College), lie had lived for some time 
at Bonn to study for liis Lectures ; and tlie influences 
of German literature and of the German character 
and state of society had made a very perceptible 
change in his views of Hfe. His personal disposition 
was much softened ; he was less mihtant and polemic ; 
his tastes had begun to turn themselves towards the 
poetic and contemplative. He attached much less 
importance than formerly to outward changes ; unless 
accompanied by a better cultivation of the inward 
nature. He had a strong distaste for the general 
meanness of English life, the absence of enlarged 
thoughts and unselfish desires, the low objects on 
which the faculties of all classes of the English are 
intent. Even the kind of public interests which 
Enghshmen care far, he held in very little esteem. 
He thought that there was more practical good 
government, and (which is true enough) infinitely 
more care for the education and mental improvement 
of all ranks of the people, under the Prussian 
monarchy, than under the English representative 
government : and he held, with the French Econo- 
mistes, that the real security for good government is 
*' un peuple eclair e," which is not always the fruit of 
popular institutions, and which if it could be had 
without them, would do their work better than they. 
Though he approved of the Heform Bill, he predicted, 
what in fact occurred, that it would not produce the 

N 



178 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

great immediate improvements in government, whicli 
many expected from it. The men, he said, who 
could do these great things, did not exist in the 
country. There were m.any points of sympathy 
between him and me, both in the new opinions he 
had adopted and in the old ones which he retained. 
Like me, he never ceased to be an utilitarian, and 
with all his love of the Germans, and enjoyment 
of their literature, never became in the smallest 
degree reconciled to the innate-principle metaphysics. 
He cultivated more and more a kind of German 
religion, a religion of poetry and feeling with little, if 
anything, of positive dogma ; while, in politics (and 
here it was that I most differed with him) he acquired 
an indifference, bordering on contempt, for the 
progress of popular institutions : though he rejoiced 
in that of Socialism, as the most effectual means of 
compelling the powerful classes to educate the peoj)le, 
and to impress on them the only real means of per- 
manently improving their material condition, a 
limitation of their numbers. Neither was he, at this 
time, fundamentally opposed to Socialism in itself as 
an ultimate result of improvement. He professed 
great disrespect for what he called " the universal 
principles of human nature of the political economists," 
and insisted on the evidence which history and daily 
experience afford of the " extraordinary pliabihty of 
human nature" (a phrase which I have somewhere 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 179 

borrowed from him) ; nor did he think it possible to 
set any positive bounds to the moral capabilities 
which might unfold themselves in mankind, under an 
enlightened direction of social and educational m- 
fluences. Whether he retained all these opinions to 
the end of life I know not. Certainly the modes of 
thinking of his later years, and especially of his last 
publication, were much more Tory in their general 
character than those which he held at this time. 

My father's tone of thought and feeling, I now 
felt myself at a great distance from : greater, indeed, 
than a full and calm explanation and reconsideration 
on both sides, might have shown to exist in reality. 
But my father was not one with whom calm and full 
explanations on fundamental points of doctrine could 
be expected, at least with one whom he might con- 
sider as, in some sort, a deserter from his standard. 
Fortunately we were almost always in strong agree- 
ment on the political questions of the day, which 
engrossed a large part of his interest and of his 
conversation. On those matters of opinion on which 
we differed, we talked little. He knew that the 
habit of thinking for myself, which his mode of 
education had fostered, sometimes led me to opinions 
different from his, and he perceived from time to 
time that I did not always tell him how different. 
I expected no good, but only pain to both of us, from 
discussing our differences : and I never expressed them 

N 2 



180 ONE STAGE ONWARD, 

but when he gave utterance to some opinion or feeling 
repugnant to mine, in a manner which would have 
made it disingenuousness on my part to remain silent. 
It remains to speak of what I wrote during these 
years, which, independently of my contributions to 
newspapers, was considerable. In 1830 and 1831 I 
wrote the five Essays since published under the title 
of " Essays on some Unsettled Questions of Political 
Economy," almost as they now stand, except that 
in 1833 I partially rewrote the fifth Essay. They 
were written with no immediate purpose of publica- 
tion ; and when, some years later, I offered them to 
a publisher, he declined them. They were only 
printed in 1844, after the success of the "System of 
Logic." I also resumed my speculations on this last 
subject, and puzzled myself, like others before me, 
with the great para^dox of the discovery of new 
truths by general reasoning. As to the fact, there 
could be no doubt. As little could it be doubted, 
that all reasoning is resolvable into syllogisms, and 
that in every syllogism the conclusion is actually 
contained and implied in the premises. How, being 
so contained and implied, it could be new truth, and 
how the theorems of geometry, so different in ap- 
pearance from the definitions and axioms, could be 
all contained in these, was a difiiculty which no one, 
I thought, had sufiiciently felt, and which, at all 
events, no one had succeeded in clearing up. The 



ONE STAGE ONWAED. 181 

explanations offered bj Whately and others, though 
they might give a temporary satisfaction, always, in 
my mind, left a mist still hanging over the subject. 
At last, when reading a second or third time the 
chapters on Reasoning in the second volume of 
Dugald Stewart, interrogating myself on every 
point, and following out, as far as I knew how, every 
topic of thought which the book suggested, I came 
upon an idea of his respecting the use of axioms in 
ratiocination, which I did not remember to have 
before noticed, but which now, in meditating on it, 
seemed to me not only true of axioms, but of all 
general propositions whatever, and to be the key of 
the whole perplexity. From this germ grew the 
theory of the Syllogism propounded in the Second 
Book of the Logic ; which I immediately fixed by 
writing it out. And now, with greatly increased 
hope of being able to produce a work on Logic, of 
some originality and value, I proceeded to write the 
First Book, from the rough and imperfect draft I had 
already made. What I now wrote became the basis 
of that part of the subsequent Treatise ; except that 
it did not contain the Theory of Kinds, which was a 
later addition, suggested by otherwise inextricable 
diiEculties which met me in my first attempt to 
work out the subject of some of the concluding 
chapters of the Third Book. At the point which I 
had now reached I made a halt, which lasted ^^' 



182 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

years. I had come to tlie end of my tetlier ; I could 
make nothing satisfactory of Induction, at this time. 
I continued to read any book which seemed to 
promise light on the subject, and appropriated, 
as well as I could, the results ; but for a long time 
I found nothing which seemed to open to me any 
very important vein of meditation. 

In 1832 I wrote several papers for the first series 
of Tait's Magazine, and one for a quarterly periodical 
called the Jurist, which had been founded, and for a 
short time carried on, by a set of friends, all lawyers 
and law reformers, with several of whom I was 
acquainted. The paper in question is the one on the 
rights and duties of the State respecting Corporation 
and Church Property, now standing first among the 
collected " Dissertations and Discussions ;" where one 
of my articles in " Tait," '' The Currency Juggle," 
also appears. In the whole mass of what I wrote 
previous to these, there is nothing of sufficient 
permanent value to justify reprinting. The paper in 
the Jurist, which I still think a very complete dis- 
cussion of the rights of the State over Foundations, 
showed both sides of my opinions, asserting as firmly 
as I should have done at any time, the doctrine that 
all endowments are national property, which 'the 
government may and ought to control ; but not, as I 
should once have done, condemning endowments in 
themselves, and proposing that they should be 



ONE STAGE ONWAED. 183 

taken to pay of the national debt. On the contrary, 
I urged strenuously the importance of having a 
provision for education, not dependent on the mere 
demand of the market, that is, on the knowledge 
and discernment of average parents, but calculated 
to establish and keep up a higher standard of 
instruction than is hkely to be spontaneously 
demanded by the buyers of the article. All these 
opinions have been confirmed and strengthened by 
the whole course of my subseq^uent reflections. 



CHAPTEH YI. 



COMMENCEMENT OF THE MOST VALUABLE FRIENDSHIP 
OF MY LIFE. MY FATHER'S DEATH. WRITINGS 
AND OTHER PROCEEDINGS UP TO 1840. 

1 T was at the period of my mental progress whicli I 
have now readied that I formed the friendship 
which has been the honour and chief blessing of my 
existence, as well as the source of a great part of all 
that I have attempted to do, or hope to effect here- 
after, for human improvement. My first introduction 
to the lady who, after a friendship of twenty years, 
consented to become my wife, was in 1830, when I 
was in my twenty-fifth and she in her twenty-thkd 
year. With her husband's family it was the renewal 
of an old acquaintanceship. His grandfather lived 
in the next house to my father's in Newington 
Green, and I had, sometimes when a boy, been 
invited to play in the old gentleman's garden. He 
was a fine specimen of the old Scotch Puritan ; stern, 
severe, and powerful, but very kind to children, on 
whom such men make a lasting impression. Al- ' 
though it was years after my introduction to Mrs. 
Taylor before my acquaintance with her became at 



THE MOST VALUABLE FRIENDSHIP OF MY LIFE. 185 

all intimate or confidential, I very soon felt her to be 
tlie most admirable person I had ever known. It is 
not to be supposed that she was, or that any one, at 
the age at which I first saw her, could be, all that 
she afterwards became. Least of all could this be true 
of her, with whom self-improvement, progress in the 
highest and in all senses, was a law of her nature ; 
a necessity equally from the ardour with w^hich she 
sought it, and from the spontaneous tendency of 
faculties which could not receive an impression or an 
experience without making it the source or the 
occasion of an accession of wisdom. Up to the time 
when I first saw her, her rich and powerful nature 
had chiefly unfolded itself according to the received 
type of feminine genius. To her outer circle she was 
a beauty and a wit, with an air of natural distinction, 
felt by all who approached her : to the inner, a 
woman of deep and strong feeling, of penetrating and 
intuitive intelligence, and of an eminently meditative 
and poetic nature. Married at an early age, to a 
most upright, brave, and honourable man, of liberal 
opinions and good education, but without the 
intellectual or artistic tastes which would have 
made him a companion for her, though a steady and 
afiectionate friend, for whom she had true esteem 
and the strongest affection through life, and whom 
she most deeply lamented when dead ; shut out by 
the social disabilities of women from any adequate 



186 COMMENCEMENT OF THE MOST 

exercise of her Kighest faculties in action on tlie 
world without ; her life was one of inward medita- 
tion, varied by familiar intercourse with a small 
circle of friends, of whom one only (long since de- 
ceased) was a person of genius, or of capacities of 
feeling or intellect kindred with her own, but all 
had more or less of alliance with her in sentiments, 
and opinions. Into this circle I had the good for- 
tune to be admitted, and I soon perceived that she 
possessed in combination, the qualities which m all 
other persons whom I had known I had been only 
too happy to find singly. In her, complete emanci- 
pation from every kind of superstition (including 
that which attributes a pretended perfection to the 
order of nature and the universe), and an earnest 
protest against many things which are stiU part of 
the established constitution of society, resulted not 
from the hard intellect, but from strength of noble 
and elevated feeling, and co-existed with a highly 
reverential nature. In general spiritual charac- 
teristics, as well as in temperament and organization, 
I have often compared her, as she was at this time, 
to Shelley : but in thought and intellect, Shelley, so 
far as his powers were developed in his short life, 
was but a child compared with what she ultimately 
became. Alike in the highest regions of speculation 
and in the smaller practical concerns of daily life, her 
mind was the same perfect instrument, piercing to 



VALUABLE FRIENDSHIP OF MY LIFE. 187 

tlie very heart and marrow of the matter ; always 
seizing the essential idea or principle. The same 
exactness and rapidity of operation, pervading as it 
did her sensitive as well as her mental faculties, 
would, with her gifts of feeling and imagination, have 
fitted her to be a consummate artist, as her fiery 
and tender soul and her vigorous eloquence would 
certainly have made her a great orator, and her pro- 
found knowledge of human na^ture a,nd discernment 
and sagacity in practical life, would, in the times 
when such a carriere was open to women, have made 
her eminent among the rulers of mankind. Her in- 
tellectual gifts did but minister to a moral character 
at once the noblest and the best balanced which I 
have ever met with in life. Her unselfishness was 
not that of a taught system of duties, but of a heart 
which thoroughly identified itself with the feelings of 
others, and often went to excess in consideration for 
them by imaginatively investing their feehngs with 
the intensity of its own. The passion of justice 
might have been thought to be her strongest feeling, 
but for her boundless generosity, and a lovingness 
ever ready to pour itself forth upon any or all 
human beings who were capable of giving the 
smallest feeling in return. The rest of her moral 
characteristics were such as naturally accompany 
these qualities of mind and heart : the most 
genuine mxodesty combined with the loftiest pride ; 



188 COMMENCEMENT OF THE MOST 

a simplicity and sincerity wliicK were absolute, 
towards ail who were fit to receive them ; the 
utmost scorn of whatever was mean and cowardly, 
and a burning indignation at everything brutal or 
tyrannical, faithless or dishonourable in conduct and 
character, while making the broadest distinction 
between mala in se and mere mala prohibita — 
between acts giving evidence of intrinsic badness in 
feeling and character, and those which are only 
violations of conventions either good or bad, viola- 
tions which whether in themselves right or wrong, 
are capable of being committed by persons in every 
other respect loveable or admirable. 

To be admitted into any degree of mental inter- 
course with a being of these qualities, could not but 
have a most beneficial influence on my development ; 
though the effect was only gradual, and many years 
elapsed before her mental progress and mine went 
forward in the complete companionship they at last 
attained. The benefit I received was far greater than 
any which I could hope to give ; though to her, who 
had at first reached her opinions by the moral intui- 
tion of a character of strong feeling, there was 
doubtless help as well as encouragement to be 
derived from one who had arrived at many of the 
same results by study and reasoning : and in the 
rapidity of her intellectual growth, her mental 
• activity, which converted everything into knowledge, 



VALUABLE FKIENDSHIP OF MY LIFE. 189 

doubtless drew from me, as it did from other sources, 
many of its materials. What I owe, even intel- 
lectually, to her, is in its detail, almost infinite ; ot 
its general character a few words will give some, 
though a very imperfect, idea. 

"With those who, like all the best and wisest of 
mankind, are dissatisfied with human life as it is, and 
whose feelings are wholly identified with its radical 
amendment, there are two main regions of thought. 
One is the region of ultimate aims ; the constituent 
elements of the highest realizable ideal of human life. 
The other is that of the immediately useful and prac- 
tically attainable. In both these departments, I have 
acquired more from her teaching, than from all other 
sources taken together. And, to say truth, it is in these 
two extremes principally, that real certainty lies. My 
own strength lay wholly in the uncertain and slippery 
intermediate region, that of theory, or moral and poli- 
tical science : respectmg the conclusions of which, in 
any of the forms in which I have received or originated 
them, whether as political economy, analytic psy- 
chology, logic, philosophy of history, or anything else, 
it is not the least of my intellectual obligations to 
her that I have derived from her a wise scepticism, 
which, while it has not hindered me from following 
out the honest exercise of my thinking faculties to 
whatever conclusions might result from it, has put 
me on my guard against holding or announcing these 



190 COMMENCEMENT OF THE MOST 

conclusions with a degree of confidence whicli the 
nature of such speculations does not warrant, and has 
kept my mind not only open to admit, but prompt to 
welcome and eager to seek, even on the questions on 
which I have most meditated, any prospect of clearer 
perceptions and better evidence. I have often 
received praise, which in my own right I only 
partially deserve, for the greater practicahty which 
is supposed to be found in my writings, compared 
with those of most thinkers who have been equally 
addicted to large generalizations. The writings in 
which this quality has been observed, were not the 
work of one mind, but of the fusion of two, one of 
them as pre -eminently practical in its judgments and 
perceptions of things present, as it was high and 
bold in its anticipations for a remote futurity. 

At the present period, however, this influence was 
only one among many which were helping to shape 
the character of my future development : and even 
after it became, I may truly say, the presiding 
principle of my mental progress, it did not alter the 
path, but only made me move forward more boldly, 
and, at the same time, more cautiously, in the same 
course. The only actual revolution which has ever 
taken place in my modes of thinking, was already 
complete. My new tendencies had to be confirmed 
in some respects, moderated in others : but the only 
substantial changes of opinion that were yet to come, 



VALUABLE FRIENDSHIP OF MY LIFE. 191 

related to politics, and consisted, on one hand, in a 
greater approximation, so far as regards the ultimate 
prospects of humanity, to a qualified Socialism, and 
on the other, a shifting of my political ideal from 
pure democracy, as commonly understood by its 
partizans, to the modified form of it, which is set 
forth in my " Considerations on Representative 
Government." 

This last change, which took place very gradually, 
dates its commencement from my reading, or rather 
study, of M. de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," 
v/hich fell into my hands immediately after its first 
appearance. In that remarkable work, the excel- 
lences of democracy were pointed out in a more 
conclusive, because a more specific manner than I 
had ever known them to be, even by the most 
enthusiastic democrats ; while the specific dangers 
which beset democracy, considered as the govern- 
ment of the numerical majority, were brought into 
equally strong light, and subjected to a masterly 
analysis, not as reasons for resisting what the author 
considered as an inevitable result of human progress, 
but as indications of the weak points of popular 
government, the defences by which it needs to be 
guarded, and the correctives which must be added 
to it in order that while full play is given to its 
beneficial tendencies, those which are of a different 
nature may be neutralized or mitigated. I was now 



192 COMMENCEMENT OF THE MOST 

well prepared for speculations of this cliaracter, and 
from tMs time onward mj own thoughts moved more 
and more in the same channel, though the consequent 
modifications in my practical political creed were 
spread over many years, as would be shown by 
comparing my first review of " Democracy in 
America," written and published in 1835, with the 
one in 1840 (reprinted in the " Dissertations"), and 
this last, with the " Considerations on Representative 
Government. " 

A collateral subject on which also I derived great 
benefit from the study of Tocqueville, was the 
fundamental question of centralization. The powerful 
philosophic analysis which he applied to American 
and to French experience, led him to attach the 
utmost importance to the performance of as much of 
the collective business of society, as can safely be so 
performed, by the people themselves, without any 
intervention of the executive government, either to 
supersede their agency, or to dictate the manner of 
its exercise. He viewed this practical political 
activity of the individual citizen, not only as one of 
the most efiectual means of training the social 
feelings and practical intelligence of the people, so 
im.portant in themselves and so indispensable to 
good government, but also as the specific counter- 
active to some of the characteristic infirmities of 
democracy, and a necessary protection against its 



VALUABLE FKIENDSHIP OF MY LIFE. 198 

degenerating into tlie only despotism of wliicli, in the 
modern world, there is real danger — the absolute rule 
of the head of the executive over a congregation of 
isolated individuals, all equals but all slaves. There 
v/as, indeed, no immediate peril from this source on 
the British side of the channel, where nine-tenths of 
the internal business which elsewhere devolves on 
the government, was transacted by agencies inde- 
pendent of it ; where centralization was, and is, the 
subject not only of rational disapprobation, but of 
unreasoning prejudice ; where jealousy of government 
interference was a blind feeling preventing or re- 
sisting even the most beneficial exertion of legislative 
authority to correct the abuses of what pretends to 
be local self-government, but is, too often, selfish 
mismanagement of local interests, by a jobbing and 
horiie local oligarchy. But the more certain the public 
were to go wrong on the side opposed to centraliza- 
tion, the greater danger was there lest philosophic 
reformers should fall into the contrary error, and 
overlook the mischiefs of which they had been spared 
the painful experience. I was myself, at this very 
time, actively engaged in defending important 
measures, such as the great Poor Law Beform of 
1834, against an irrational clamour grounded on the 
anti-centralization prejudice : and had it not been 
for the lessons of Tocqueville, I do not know that I 
might not, like many reformers before me, have been 

o 



194 COMMENCEMENT OF THE MOST 

hurried into the excess opposite to that, which, being 
the one prevalent in my own country, it was generally 
my business to combat. As it is, I have steered care- 
fully between the two errors, and whether I have or 
have not drawn the line between them exactly in the 
right place, I have at least insisted with equal em- 
phasis upon the evils on both sides, and have made 
the means of reconciling the advantages of both, a 
subject of serious study. 

In the meanwhile had taken place the election of 
the first Reformed Parliament, which included several 
of the most notable of my Radical friends and 
acquaintances — Grote, Boebuck, Buller, Sir William 
Molesworth, John and Edward Eomilly, and several 
more ; besides Warburton, Strutt, and others, who 
were in Parliament already. Those who thought 
themselves, and were called by their friends, the 
philosophic Radicals, had now, it seemed, a fait- 
opportunity, in a more advantageous position than 
they had ever before occupied, for showing what was 
in them ; and I, as well as my father, founded great 
hopes on them. These hopes were destined to be 
disappointed. The men were honest, and faithful to 
their opinions, as far as votes were concerned ; often 
in spite of much discouragement. When measures 
were proposed, flagrantly at variance with their 
principles, such as the Irish Coercion Bill, or the 
Canada Coercion in 1837, they came forward manfully, 



VALUABLE FEIENDSHIP OF MY LIFE. 195 

and braved any amount of hostility and prejudice 
ratlier than desert the right. But on the whole 
tliey did very little to promote any opinions ; they 
had little enterprise, little activity : they left the lead 
of the Radical portion of the House to the old hands, 
to Hume and O'Connell. A partial exception must 
be made in favour of one or two of the younger men ; 
and in the case of Roebuck, it is his title to per- 
manent remembrance, that in the very first year 
during which he sat in Parliament, he originated (or 
re- originated after the unsuccessful attempt of 
Mr. Brougham) the parliamentary movement for 
National Education ; and that he was the first to 
commence, and for years carried on almost alone, the 
contest for the self-government of the Colonies. 
Nothing, on the whole equal to these two things, 
was done by any other individual, even of those from 
whom most w^as expected. And now, on a calm 
retrospect, I can perceive that the men were less in 
fault than we supposed, and that we had expected 
too much from them. They were in unfavourable 
circumstances. Their lot was cast in the ten years 
of inevitable reaction, when, the Reform excitement 
being over, and the few legislative improvements 
which the public really called for having been rapidly 
effected, power gravitated back in its natural 
direction, to those who were for keeping things as 
they were ; when the public mind desired rest, and 

o 2 



196 COMMENCEMENT OF THE MOST 

was less disposed than at any other period since the 
peace, to let itself be moved by attempts to work up 
the Reform feeh'ng into fresh activity in favour of new 
things. It would have required a great political 
leader, which no one is to be blamed for not being, 
to' have effected really great things by parliamentary 
discussion when the nation was in this mood. My 
father and I had hoped that some competent leader 
might arise; some man of philosophic attainments 
and popular talents, who could have put heart into the 
many younger or less distinguished men that would 
have been ready to join him — could have made them 
available, to the extent of their talents, in bringing 
advanced ideas before the public — could have used 
the House of Commons as a rostra or a teacher's 
chair for instructing and impelling the public mind ; 
and would either have forced the Whigs to receive 
their measures from him, or have taken the lead of 
the Keform party out of their hands. Such a leader 
there would have been, if my father had been in 
Parliament. For want of such a man, the instructed 
Radicals sank into a mere Cdte Gauche of the Whig 
party. With a keen, and as I now think, an exag- 
gerated sense of the possibilities which were open to 
the Radicals if they made even ordinary exertion for 
their opinions, I laboured from this time till 1839, both 
by personal influence with some of them, and by 
writings, to put ideas into their heads, and purpose 



VALUABLE FHIENDSHIP OF MY LIFE. 197 

into tlieir hearts. I did some good with Charles 
Biiller, and some with Sir William Molesworth ; both 
of whom did valuable service, but were unhappily 
cut off almost in the beerinnino^ of their usefulness. 
On the whole, however, my attempt was vain. To 
have had a chance of succeeding in it, required a 
different position from mine. It was a task only for 
one who, being himself in Parliament, could have 
mixed with the Radical members in daily consulta- 
tion, could himself have taken the initiative, and 
instead of urging others to lead, could have summoned 
them to follow. 

What I could do by writing, I did. During the 
year 1833 I continued working in the Examiner with 
Fonblanque, who at that time was zealous in keeping 
up the fight for Eadicalism against the Whig ministry. 
During the session of 1834 I wrote comments on 
passing events, of the nature of newspaper articles 
(under the title of " Notes on the Newspapers"), in 
the Monthly Repository, a magazine conducted by 
Mr. Fox, well known as a preacher and political 
orator, and subsequently as member of Parliament 
for Oldham-; with whom I had lately become ac- 
quainted, and for whose sake chiefly I wrote in his 
magazine. I contributed several other articles to 
this periodical, the most considerable of which (on 
the theory of Poetry), is reprinted in the " Disserta- 
tions." Altogether, the writings (independently of 



198 COMMENCEMENT 0:i? THE MOST 

those in newspapers) wliicli I published from 1832 to 
1834, amount to a large volume. This, however, 
includes abstracts of several of Plato's Dialogues, 
with introductory remarks, which, though not pub- 
lished until 1834, had been written several years 
earlier ; and which I afterwards, on various occasions, 
found to have been read, and their authorship known, 
by more people than were aware of anything else 
which I had written, up to that time. To complete 
the tale of my writings at this period, I may add 
that in 1833, at the request of Bulwer, who vfas just 
then completing his *' England and the English" (a 
work, at that time, greatly in advance of the public 
mind), I wrote for him a critical account of Bentham's 
philosophy, a small part of which he incorporated in 
Ills text, and printed the rest (with an honourable 
acknowledgment), as an appendix. In this, along 
with the favourable, a part also of the unfavourable 
side of my estimation of Bentham's doctrines, con- 
sidered as a complete philosophy, was for the first 
time put into print. 

But an opportunity soon offered, by which, as it 
seemed, I might have it in my j)ower to give 
more effectual aid, and, at the same time, stimulus, 
to the " philosophic Badical" party, than I had 
done hitherto. One of the projects occasionally 
talked of between my father and me, and some 
of the parliamentary and other Badicals who 
frequented his house, was the foundation of a 



VALUABLE FHIENDSHIP OF MY LIFE. 199 

periodical organ of philosophic radicahsm, to take 
the place which the Westminster Eeview had been 
intended to fill : and the scheme had gone so far as 
to bring under discussion the pecuniary contributions 
which could be looked for, and the choice of an 
editor. Nothing, however, came of it for some time : 
but in the summer of 1834 Sir Wilham Molesworth, 
himself a laborious student, and a precise and meta- 
physical thinker, capable of aiding the cause by his 
pen as well as by his purse, spontaneously proposed 
to establish a Eeview, provided I would consent to 
be the real, if I could not be the ostensible, editor. 
Such a proposal was not to be refused ; and the 
Review was founded, at first under the title of the 
London Eeview, and afterwards under that of 
the London and Westminster, Molesworth having 
bought the Westminster from its proprietor, General 
Thompson, and merged the two into one. In the 
years between 1834 and 1840 the conduct of this 
Eeview occupied the greater part of my spare time. 
In the beginning, it did not, as a whole, by any 
means represent my opinions. I was under the 
necessity of conceding much to my inevitable asso- 
ciates. The Eeview was established to be the repre- 
sentative of the " philosophic Eadicals," with most 
of whom I was now at issue on many essential points, 
and among whom I could not even claim to be the 
most important individual. My father's co-operation 
as a writer we all deemed indispensable, and he wrote 



200 COMMENCEMENT OE THE MOST 

largely in it until prevented by his last illness. 
The subjects of his articles, and the strength and 
decision with which his opinions were expressed in 
them, made the Review at first derive its tone and 
colouring from him much more than from any 
of the other writers. I could not exercise editorial 
control over his articles, and I was sometimes obliged 
to sacrifice to him portions of my own. The old 
Westminster Review doctrines, but little modified, 
thus formed the staple of the Eeview ; but I hoped, 
by the side of these, to introduce other ideas 
and another tone, and to obtain for my own shade of 
opinion a fair representation, along with those of 
other members of the party. With this end chiefly 
:*n view, I made it one of the pecuharities of the 
work that every article should bear an initial, or some 
other signature, and be held to express the opinions 
solely of the individual wiiter ; the editor being only 
responsible for its being worth publishing, and not in 
conflict with the objects for which the Review was set 
on foot. I had an opportunity of putting in practice 
my scheme of conciliation between the old and the 
new " philosophic radicalism," by the choice of a sub- 
ject for my own first contribution. Professor Sedg- 
wick, a man of eminence in a particular walk of 
natural science, but who should not have trespassed 
into philosophy, had lately published his Discourse 
on the Studies of Cambridge, which had as its most 



VALUABLE FRIENDSHIP OF MY LIFE. 201 

prominent feature an intemperate assault on analytic 
psychology and utilitarian ethics, in the form of an 
attack on Locke and Paley. Tliis had excited great 
indignation in my father and others, which I thought 
it fully deserved. And here, I imagined, was an 
opportunity of at the same time repelling an unjust 
attack, and inserting into my defence of Hartleianism 
and Utihtarianism a number of the opinions which 
constituted my view of those subjects, as distinguished 
from that of my old associates. In this I partially 
succeeded, though my relation to my father would 
have made it painful to me in any case, and impos- 
sible in a Eeview for which he wrote, to speak out 
my whole mind on the subject at this time. 

I am, however, inclined to think that my father 
was not so much opposed as he seemed, to the modes 
of thought in which I believed myself to differ from 
him ; that he did injustice to his own opinions by 
the unconscious exaggerations of an intellect em- 
phatically polemical ; and that when thinking with- 
out an adversary in view, he was willing to make 
room for a great portion of the truths he seemed to 
deny. I have frequently observed that he made 
large allowance in practice for considerations which 
seemed to have no place in his theory. His " Frag- 
ment on Mackintosh," which he wrote and published 
about this time, although I greatly admired some 
parts of it, I read as a whole with more pain than 



20i MY father's death. 

pleasure ; yet on reading it again, long after, I found 
little in the opinions it contains, but what I think in 
the main just ; and I can even sympathize in his 
disgust at the verbiage of Mackintosh, though his 
asperity towards it went not only beyond what was 
judicious, but beyond what was even fair. One 
thing, which I thought, at the time, of good augury, 
was the very favourable reception he gave to 
Tocquevilles "Democracy in America." It is true, 
he said and thought much more about what Tocque- 
ville said in favour of democracy, than about what 
he said of its disadvantages. Still, his high appre- 
ciation of a book which was at any rate an example 
of a mode of treating the question of government 
almost the reverse of his — wholly inductive and 
analytical, instead of purely ratiocinative — ^gave me 
great encouragement. He also approved of an article 
which I published in the first number following the 
junction of the two reviews, the essay reprinted in 
the " Dissertations," under the title " Civilization ;" 
into which I threw many of my new opinions, and 
criticised rather emphatically the mental and moral 
tendencies of the time, on grounds and in a manner 
which I certainly had not learnt from him. 

All speculation, however, on the possible future 
developments of my father's opinions, and on the 
probabilities of permanent co-operation between him 
and me in the promulgation of our thoughts, was 



MY father's death. 203 

doomed to be cut short. During the whole of 1835 
his health had been declining : his symptoms became 
unequivocally those of pulmonary consumption, and 
after lingering to the last stage of debility, he died 
on the 23rd of June, 1836. Until the last few days 
of his life there was no apparent abatement of intel- 
lectual vigour ; his interest in all things and persons 
that had interested him through life was un- 
diminished, nor did the approach of death cause 
the smallest wavering (as in so strong and firm a 
mind it was impossible that it should) in his con- 
victions on the subject of religion. His principal 
satisfaction, after he knew that his end was near, 
seemed to be the thought of what he had done to 
make the world better than he found it ; and his 
chief regret in not living longer, that he had not had 
time to do more. 

His place is an eminent one in the Kterary, and 
even in the political history of his country ; and it 
is far from honourable to the generation which has 
benefited by his worth, that he is so seldom men- 
tioned, and, compared with men far his inferiors, 
so little remembered. This is probably to be ascribed 
mainly to two causes. In the first place, the thought 
of him merges too much in the deservedly superior 
fame of Bentham. Yet he was anything but Ben- 
tham's mere follower or disciple. Precisely because 
he was himself one of the most original thinkers of 



204 MY fathee's death. 

his time, he was one of tlie earliest to appreciate and 
adopt the most important mass of original thought 
which had been produced by the generation pre- 
ceding him. His mind and Bentham's were essen- 
tially of different construction. He had not all 
Bentham's high qualities, but neither had Bentham 
all his. It would, indeed, be ridiculous to claim for 
him the praise of having accomplished for mankind 
such splendid services as Bentham's. He did not 
revolutionize, or rather create, one of the great 
departments of human thought. But, leaving out 
of the reckoning all that portion of his labours in 
which he benefited by what Bentham had done, and 
counting only what he achieved in a province in 
which Bentham had done nothing, that of analytic 
psychology, he will be known to posterity as one of 
the greatest names in that most important branch 
of speculation, on which all the moral and political 
sciences ultimately rest, and will mark one of the 
essential stages in its progress. The other reason 
which has made his fame less than he deserved, 
is that notwithstanding the great number of his 
opinions which, partly through his own efforts, have 
now been generally adopted, there was, on the 
whole, a marked opposition between his spirit and 
that of the present time. As Brutus was called the 
last of the Bomans, so was he the last of the 
eighteenth century : he continued its tone of 



MY FATHERS DEATH. 205 

tliought and sentiment into the nineteenth (though 
not unmodified nor unimproved), partaking neither 
in the good nor in the bad influences of the reaction 
against the eighteenth century, which was the great 
characteristic of the first half of the nineteenth. 
The eighteenth century was a great age, an age of 
strong and brave men, and he was a fit companion 
for its strongest and bravest. By his writings and 
his personal influence he was a great centre of light 
to his generation. During his later years he was 
quite as much the head and leader of the intellec- 
tual radicals in England, as Voltaire was of the 
pMlosophes of France. It is only one of his minor 
merits, that he was the originator of all sound states- 
manship in regard to the subject of his largest 
work, India. He wrote on no subject which he did 
not enrich with valuable thought, and excepting 
the " Elements of Political Economy," a very useful 
book when first written, but which has now for 
some time finished its work, it will be long before 
any of his books will be wholly superseded, or will 
cease to be instructive reading to students of their 
subjects. In the power of influencing by mere force 
of mind and character, the convictions and purposes 
of others, and in the strenuous exertion of that 
power to promote freedom and progress, he left, as 
my knowledge extends, no equal among men, and 
but one among women. 



206 WRITINGS AND OTHER 

Tliougli acutely sensible of my own inferiority in 
tlie qualities by wliich lie acquired bis personal 
ascendancy, I bad now to try wbat it migiit be pos- 
sible for me to accomplish without him : and the 
Review was the instrument on which I built my 
chief hopes of establishing a useful influence over 
the liberal and democratic section of the public 
mind. Deprived of my father's aid, I was also 
exempted from the restraints and reticences by 
which that aid had been purchased. I did not feel 
that there was any other radical writer or politician 
to whom I was bound to defer, further than con- 
sisted with my own opinions : and having the com- 
plete confidence of Molesworth, I resolved henceforth 
to give full scope to my own opinions and modes of 
thought, and to open the Review widely to all writers 
who were in sympathy with Progress as I understood 
it, even though I should lose by it the support of 
my former associates. Carlyle, consequently, became 
from this time a frequent writer in the Eeview; 
Sterling, soon after, an occasional one ; and though 
each individual article continued to be the expression 
of the private sentiments of its writer, the general 
tone conformed in some tolerable degree to my 
opinions. For the conduct of the Eeview, under, 
and in conjunction with me, T associated with myself 
a young Scotchman of the name of Robertson, who 
had some ability and information, much industry, 



PEOCEEDINGS UP TO 1840. 207 

and an active scheming head, full of devices for 
making the Keview more saleable, and on whose 
capacities in that direction I founded a good deal of 
hope : insomuch, that when Molesworth, in the 
beginning of 1837, became tired of carrying on the 
Review at a loss, and desirous of getting rid of it 
(he had done his part honourably, and at no small 
pecuniary cost,) I, very imprudently for my own 
pecuniary interest, and very much from reliance on 
Robertson's devices, determined to continue it at my 
own risk, until his plans should have had a fair trial. 
The devices were good, and I never had any reason 
to change my opinion of them. But I do not believe 
that any devices wonld have made a radical and 
democratic review defray its expenses, including a 
paid editor or sub- editor, and a liberal payment to 
writers. I myself and several frequent contributors 
gave our labour gratuitously, as we had done for 
Molesworth ; but the paid contributors continued to 
be remunerated on the usual scale of the Edinburgh 
and Quarterly Reviews ; and this could not be done 
from the proceeds of the sale. 

In the same year, 1837, and in the midst of these 
occupations, I resumed the Logic. I had not touched 
my pen on the subject for &ve years, having been 
stopped and brought to a halt on the threshold of 
Induction. I had gradually discovered that what 
was mainly wanting, to overcome the difficulties of 



208 WRITINGS AND OTHEU 

that brancli of the subject, was a compreliensive, 
and, at the same time, accurate view of the whole 
circle of physical science, which I feared it would 
take me a long course of study to acquire ; since I 
knew not of any book, or other guide, that would 
spread out before me the generalities and processes 
of the sciences, and I aj^prehended that I should have 
no choice but to extract them for myself, as I best 
could, from the details. Happily for me, Dr. Whewell, 
early in this year, published his History of the 
-Inductive Sciences. I read it with eagerness, and 
found in it a considerable approximation to what I 
wanted. Much, if not most, of the philosophy of the 
work appeared open to objection ; but the materials 
were there, for my own thoughts to work upon : and 
the author had given to those materials that first 
degree of elaboration, which so greatly facilitates and 
abridges the subsequent labour. I had now obtained 
what I ha,d been waiting for. Under the impulse 
given me by the thoughts excited by Dr. Whewell, 
I read again Sir J. Herschel's discourse on the 
Study of Natural Philosophy : and. I was able 
to measure the progress my mind had made, by the 
great help I now found in this work — though I had 
read and even reviewed it several years before with 
little profit. I now set myself vigorously to work 
out the subject m thought and in writing. The 
time I bestowed on this had to be stolen from occu- 



PROCEEDINGS UP TO 1840. 209 

pations more urgent. I had just two montlis to 
spare, at this period, in the intervals of writing for 
the Review. In these two months I completed the 
first draft of about a third, the most difficult third, of 
the book. What I had before written, I estimate at 
another third, so that only one-third remained. 
What I wrote at this time consisted of the remainder 
of the doctrine of Eeasoning (the theory of Trains 
of Beasoning, and Demonstrative Science), and the 
greater part of the Book on Induction. When this 
was done, I had, as it seemed to me, untied all the 
really hard knots, and the completion of the book 
had become only a question of time. Having got 
thus far, I had to leave off in order to write two 
articles for the next number of the Eeview. When 
these were written, I returned to the subject, and 
now for the first time fell in "vith Comte's Cour de 
Philosophie Positive, or rather with the two volumes 
of it which were all that had at that time been 
published. 

My theory of Induction was substantially com- 
pleted before I knew of Comte's book ; and it is 
perhaps well that I came to it by a different road 
from his, since the consequence has been that my 
treatise contains, what his certainly does not, a 
reduction of the inductive process to strict rules and 
to a scientific test, such as the syllogism is for ratio- 
cination. Comte is always precise and profound on 

p 



210 WETTINGS AND OTHER 

the metliod of investigation, but he does not even 
attempt any exact definition of the conditions of 
proof: and his writings show that he never attained 
a just conception of them. This, however, was 
specifically the problem which, in treating of Induc- 
tion, I had proposed to myself Nevertheless, I 
gained much from Comte, with which to enrich my 
chapters in the subsequent rewriting : and his book 
was of essential service to me in some of the parts 
which stiU remained to be thought out. As his sub- 
sequent volumes successively made their appearance, 
I read them with avidity, but, when he reached the 
subject of Social Science, with varying feelings. 
The fourth, volume disappointed me : it contained 
those of his opinions on social subjects with which I 
most disagree. But the fifth, containing the con- 
nected view of history, rekindled all my enthusiasm ; 
which the sixth (or concluding) volume did not mate- 
rially abate. In a merely logical point of view, the 
only leading conception for which I - am indebted to 
him is that of the Inverse Deductive Method, as the 
one chiefly applicable to the complicated subjects of 
History and Statistics : a process differing from the 
more common form of the deductive method in 
this — that instead of arriving at its conclusions by 
general reasoning, and verifying them by specific 
experience (as is the natural order in the deductive 
branches of physical science), it obtains its generali- 



PROCEEDINGS UP TO 1840. 211 

zations by a collation of specific experience, and 
verifies tliem by ascertaining whettier they are such 
as would follow from known general principles. 
This was an idea entirely new to me when I found 
it in Comte : and but for him I might not soon (if 
ever) have arrived at it. 

I had been long an ardent admirer of Comte 's 
writings before I had any communication with him- 
self ; nor did I ever, to the last, see him in the body. 
But for some years we were frequent correspondents, 
until our correspondence became controversial, and 
our zeal cooled. I was the first to slacken corre- 
spondence ; he was the first to drop it. I found, and 
he probably found Hkewise, that 1 could do no good 
to his mind, and that all the good he could do to 
mine, he did by his books. This would never have 
led to discontinuance of intercourse, if the differences 
between us had been on matters of simple doctrine. 
But they were chiefly on those points of opinion 
which blended in both of us with our strongest 
feelings, and determined the entire direction of our 
aspirations. I had fully agreed with him when he 
maintained that the mass of mankind, including 
even their rulers in all the practical departments of 
life, must, from the necessity of the case, accept most 
of their opinions on political and social matters, as 
they do on physical, from the authority of those who 
have bestowed more study on those subjects than 

p 2 



212 WRITINGS AND OTHER 

they generally have it in tlieir power to do. This 
lesson had been strongly impressed on me by the 
early work of Comte, to which I have adverted. 
And- there was nothing in his great Treatise which I 
admired more than his remarkable exposition of the 
benefits which the nations of modern Europe have 
historically derived from the separation, during the 
Middle Ages, of temporal and spiritual power, and 
the distinct organization of the latter. I agreed 
with him that the moral and intellectual ascendancy, 
once exercised by priests, must in time pass into the 
hands of philosophers, and will naturally do so when 
they become sufficiently unanimous, and in other 
respects worthy to possess it. But when he exagge- 
rated this line of thought into a practical system, in 
which philosophers were to be organized into a kind 
of corporate hierarchy, invested with almost the same 
spiritual supremacy (though without any secular 
power) once possessed by the Catholic Church ; when 
I found him relying on this spiritual authority as the 
only security for good government, the sole bulwark 
against practical oppression, and expecting that by 
it a system of despotisra in the state and despotism 
in the family would be rendered innocuous and bene- 
ficial ; it is not surprising, that while as logicians we 
were nearly at one, as sociologists we could travel 
together no further. M. Comte lived to carry out 
these doctrines to their extremest consequences, by 



PEOCEEDINGS UP TO 1840. 213 

planning, in his last work, the " Systeme de Politique 
Positive," the completest system of spiritual and 
temporal despotism which ever yet emanated from a 
human brain, unless possibly that of Ignatius Loyola ; 
a system by which the yoke of general opinion, 
wielded by an organized body of spiritual teachers 
and rulers, would be made supreme over every action, 
and as far as is in human possibility, every thought, 
of every member of the community, as well in the 
things which regard only himself, as in those which 
concern the interests of others. It is but just to 
say that this work is a considerable improvement, in 
many points of feeling, over Comte's previous 
writings on the same subjects : but as an accession 
to social philosophy, the only value it seems to me 
to possess, consists in putting an end to the notion 
that no effectual moral authority can be maintained 
over society without the aid of religious belief; 
for Comte's work recognises no religion except that 
of Humanity, yet it leaves an irresistible convic- 
tion that any moral beHefs concurred in by the 
community generally, may be brought to bear upon 
the whole conduct and lives of its individual 
members, with an energy and potency truly alarm- 
ing to think of The book stands a monumental 
warning to thinkers on society and politics, of what 
happens when once men lose sight in their specula- 
tions, of the value of Liberty and of Individuality. 



214 WRITINGS AND OTHER 

To return to myself. The Review engrossed, for 
some time longer, nearly all the time I could devote 
to authorship, or to thinking with authorship in 
view. The articles from the London and Westmin- 
ster E^eview which are reprinted in the *' Disserta- 
tions," are scarcely a fourth part of those I wrote. 
In the conduct of the Review I had two principal 
objects. One was to free philosophic radicalism from 
the reproach of sectarian Benthamism. I desired, 
while retaining the precision of expression, the 
definiteness of meaning, the contempt of declama- 
tory phrases and vague generalities, which were so 
honourably characteristic both of Bentham and of my 
father, to give a wider basis and a more free and 
genial character to Radical speculations ; to show 
that there was a Radical philosophy, better and more 
complete than Bentham's, while recognising and in- 
corporating all of Bentham's which is permanently 
valuable. In this first object I, to a certain extent, 
succeeded. The other thing I attempted, was to 
stir up the educated Radicals, in and out of Par- 
liament, to exertion, and induce them to make them- 
selves, what I thought by using the proper means 
they might become — a powerful party capable of 
taking the government of the country, or at least of 
dictating the terms on which they should share it 
with the Whigs. This attempt was from the first 
chimerical : partly because the time was unpropitious, 



PROCEEDINGS UP TO 1840. 215 

the Reform fervour being in its period of ebb, and 
the Tory influences powerfully rallying ; but still 
more, because, as Austin so truly said, "the country 
did not contain the men." Among the Radicals in 
Parliament there were several qualified to be useful 
members of an enhghtened Radical party, but none 
capable of forming and leading such a party. The 
exhortations I addressed to them found no response. 
One occasion did present itself when there seemed 
to be room for a bold and successful stroke for 
Radicalism. Lord Durham had left the Ministry, 
by reason, as was thought, of their not being suffi- 
ciently Liberal; he afterwards accepted from them 
the task of ascertaining and removing the causes of 
the Canadian rebellion ; he had shown a disposition 
to surround himself at the outset with Radical 
advisers ; one of his earhest measures, a good 
measure both in intention and in effect, having been 
disapproved and reversed by the Government at 
home, he had resigned his post, and placed himself 
openly in a position of quarrel with the Ministers. 
Here was a possible chief for a Radical party in the 
person of a man of importance, who was hated by 
the Tories and had just been injured by the Whigs. 
Any one who had the most elementary notions of 
party tactics, must have attempted to make some- 
thing of such an opportunity. Lord Durham was 
bitterly attacked from all sides, inveighed against by 



216 WRITINGS AND OTHER 

enemies, given up by timid friends ; wliile tliose wlio 
would willingly have defended Him did not know 
wliat to say. He appeared to be returning a de- 
feated and discredited man. I had followed the 
Canadian events from the beginning; I had been 
one of the prompters of his prompters ; his policy 
was almost exactly what mine would have been, 
and I was in a position to defend it. I wrote and 
published a manifesto in the Eeview, in which I took 
the very highest ground in his behalf, claiming for 
him not mere acquittal, but praise and honour. In- 
stantly a number of other writers took up the tone : 
I beheve there was a portion of truth in what Lord 
Durham, soon after, with polite exaggeration, said to 
me — that to this article might be ascribed the 
almost triumphal reception which he met with on 
his arrival in England. I believe it to have been 
the word in season, which, at a critical moment, 
does much to decide the result; the touch which 
determines whether a stone, set in motion at the top 
of an eminence, shall roll down on one side or on the 
other. All hopes connected with Lord Durham as 
a politician soon vanished; but with regard to 
Canadian, and generally to colonial policy, the cause 
was gained : Lord Durham's report, written by 
Charles Buller, partly under the inspii'ation of 
Wakefield, began a new era ; its recommendations, 
extending to complete internal self-government, 



PROCEEDINGS UP TO 1840. 217 

were in full operation in Canada witKin two or 
three years, and have been since extended to nearly 
all the other colonies, of European race, which have 
any claim, to the character of important communi- 
ties. And I may say that in successfully upholding 
the reputation of Lord Durham and his advisers at 
the most important moment, I contributed materially 
to this result. 

One other case occurred during my conduct of the 
Review, which similarly illustrated the effect of taking 
a prompt initiative. I believe that the early success 
and reputation of Carlyle's French Revolution, were 
considerably accelerated by what I wrote about it in 
the Review. Immediately on its publication, and before 
the commonplace critics, all whose rules and modes of 
judgment it set at defiance, had time to pre-occupy the 
public with their disapproval of it, I wrote and pub- 
lished a review of the book, haihng it as one of those 
productions of genius which are above all rules, and 
are a law to themselves. Neither in this case nor in 
that of Lord Durham do I ascribe the impression, 
which I think was produced by what I wrote, to any 
particular merit of execution : indeed, in at least one 
of the cases (the article on Carlyle) I do not think 
the execution was good. And in both instances, I 
am persuaded that anybody, in a position to be read, 
who had expressed the same opinion at the same 
precise time, and had made any tolerable statement 



218 WEITINGS AND OTHER 

of the just grounds for it, would have produced the 
same effect. But, after the complete failiure of my 
hopes of putting a new life into Radical politics by- 
means of the Review, I am glad to look back on these 
two instances of success in an honest attempt to do 
immediate service to things and persons that de- 
served it. 

After the last hope of the formation of a Radical 
party had disappeared, it was time for me to stop 
the heavy expenditure of time and money which the 
Review cost me. It had to some extent answered my 
personal purpose as a vehicle for my opmions. It had 
enabled me to express in print much of my altered 
mode of thought, and to separate myself in a marked 
manner from the narrower Benthamism of my early 
writings. This was done by the general tone of all 
I wrote, including various purely literary articles, 
but especially by the two papers (reprinted in 
the Dissertations) which attempted a philosophical 
estimate of Bentham and of Coleridge. In the first of 
these, while doing full justice to the merits of 
Bentham, I pointed out what I thought the errors 
and deficiencies of his philosophy. The substance of 
this criticism I still think perfectly just ; but I have 
sometimes doubted whether it was right to pubUsh 
it at that time. I have often felt that Bentham's 
philosophy, as an instrument of progress, has been to 
some extent discredited before it had done its work, 



PROCEEDINGS UP TO 1840. 219 

and tliat to lend a hand towards lowering its reputa- 
tion was doing more harm than service to improve- 
ment. Now, however, when a counter-reaction 
appears to be setting in towards what is good in 
Benthamism, I can look with more satisfaction on 
this criticism of its defects, especially as I have 
myself balanced it by vindications of the fundamental 
principles of Bentham s philosophy, which are re- 
printed along with it in the same collection. In the 
essay on Coleridge I attempted to characterize the 
European reaction against the negative philosophy of 
the eighteenth century : and here, if the effect only 
of this one paper were to be considered, I might be 
thought to have erred by giving undue prominence 
to the favourable side, as I had done in the case of 
Bentham to the unfavourable. In both cases, the 
impetus with which I had detached myself from 
what was untenable in the doctrines of Bentham and 
of the eighteenth century, may have carried me, 
though in appearance rather than in reality, too 
far on the contrary side. But as far as relates to the 
article on Coleridge, my defence is, that I was writing 
for Badicals and Liberals, and it was my business to 
dwell most on that, in writers of a different school, 
from the knowledge of which, they might derive most 
improvement. 

The number of the Eeview which contained the 
paper on Coleridge, was the last which was pubHshed 



220 WRITINGS, ETC., UP TO 1840. 

luring my proprietoi^sliip. In tlie spring of 1840 I 
made over the Review to Mr. Hickson, who had 
been a frequent and very useful unpaid contributor 
under my management : only stipulating that the 
change should be marked by a resumption of the old 
name, that of Westminster Eeview. Under that 
name Mr. Hickson conducted it for ten years, on the 
plan of dividing among contributors only the net 
proceeds of the Keview, giving his own labour as 
writer and editor gratuitously. Under the difficulty 
in obtaining writers, which arose from this low scale 
of payment, it is highly creditable to him that he 
was able to maintain, in some tolerable degree, the 
character of the Review as an organ of radicalism 
and progress, I did not cease altogether to write 
for the Review, but continued to send it occasional 
contributions, not, however, exclusively ; for the 
greater circulation of the Edinburgh Review induced 
me from this time to offer articles to it also when I 
had anything to say for which it appeared to be a 
suitable vehicle. And the concluding volumes of 
" Democracy in America," having just then come out, 
I inaugurated myself as a contributor to the Edin- 
burgh, by the article on that work, which heads the 
second volume of the " Dissertations. '* 



CHAPTEE VIL 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE REMAINDER OF MY LIFE. 

Tj^ROM this time, wliat is worth relating of my life 
will come into a very small compass ; for I have 
no further mental changes to tell of, but only, as I 
hope, a continued mental progress ; which does not 
admit of a consecutive history, and the results of 
which, if real, will be best found in my writings. I 
shall, therefore, greatly abridge the chronicle of my 
subsequent years. 

The first use I made of the leisure which I gained 
by disconnecting myself from the Eeview, was to 
finish the Logic. In July and August 1838, I had 
found an interval in which to execute what was still 
undone of the original draft of the Third Book. In 
working out the logical theory of those laws of 
nature which are not laws of Causation, nor corollaries 
from such laws, I was led to recognise kinds as 
realities in nature, and not mere distinctions for con- 
venience ; a light which I had not obtained when the 
First Book was written, and which made it necessary 
for me to modify and enlarge several chapters of 
that Book. The Book on Language and Classification, 



222 COMPLETION OF THE 

and tlie chapter on the Classification of Fallacies, were 
drafted in the autumn of the same year ; the re- 
mainder of the work, in the summer and autumn of 
1840. From April following, to the end of 1841, my 
spare time was devoted to a complete re-writing of 
the book from its commencement. It is in this way 
that all my books have been composed. They were 
always written at least twice over ; a first draft of 
the entire work was completed to the very end of 
the subject, then the whole begun again de novo ; 
but incorporating, in the second writing, all sentences 
and parts of sentences of the old draft, which ap- 
peared as suitable to my purpose as anything which 
I could write in lieu of them. I have found great 
advantages in this system of double redaction. It 
combines, better than any other mode of composition, 
the freshness and vigour of the first conception, with 
the superior precision and completeness resulting 
from prolonged thought. In my own case, moreover, 
I have found that the patience necessary for a 
careful elaboration of the details of composition and 
expression, costs much less efibrt after the entire 
subject has been once gone through, and the 
substance of all that I find to say has in some 
manner, however imperfect, been got upon paper. 
The only thing which I am careful, in the first draft, 
to make as perfect as I am able, is the arrangement. 
If that is bad, the whole thread on which the ideas 



SYSTEM OF LOGIC. 223 

string tliemselves becomes twisted ; thouglits -placed 
in a wrong connexion are not expounded in a manner 
that suits the right, and a first draft with this 
origfinal vice is next to useless as a foundation for 
the final treatment. 

During the re-writing of the Logic, Dr. Whewell's 
Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences made its 
appeai^nce ; a circumstance fortunate for me, as it 
gave me what I greatly desired, a full treatment of 
the subject by an antagonist, and enabled me to 
present my ideas with greater clearness and emphasis 
as well as fuller and more varied development, in 
defending them against definite objections, or con- 
fronting them distinctly with an opposite theory. 
The controversies with Dr, Whewell, as well as much 
matter derived from Comte, were first introduced 
into the book in the course of the re- writing. 

At the end of 1841, the book being ready for the 
press, I offered it to Murray, who kept it until too 
late for publication that season, and then refused it, 
for reasons which could just as well have been given 
at first. But I have had no cause to regret a rejection 
which led to my oftering it to Mr. Parker, hj whom it 
was published in the spring of 1 8 43. My original ex- 
pectations of success were extremely limited. Arch- 
bishop Whately had, indeed, rehabilitated the name 
of Logic, and the study of the forms, rules, and 
fallacies of Batiocination ; and Dr, Whewell's 



224 COMPLETION OF THE 

writings had begun to excite an interest in the 
other part of my subject, the theory of Induction. 
A treatise, however, on a matter so abstract, could 
not be expected to be popular ; it could only be a 
book for students, and students on such subjects 
were not only (at least in England) few, but ad- 
dicted chiefly to the opposite school of metaphysics, 
the ontological and '' innate principles " school. I 
therefore did not expect that the book would have 
many readers, or approvers ; and looked for little 
practical effect from it, save that of keeping the 
tradition unbroken of what I thought a better philo- 
sophy. What hopes I had of exciting any im- 
mediate attention, were mainly grounded on the 
polemical propensities of Dr. Whewell ; who, I 
thought, from observation of his conduct in other 
cases, would probably do something to bring the 
book into notice, by replying, and that promptly, to 
the attack on his opinions. He did reply, but not 
till 1850, just in time for me to answer him in the 
third edition. How the book came to have, for a 
work of the kind, so much success, and what sort of 
persons compose the bulk of those who have bought, 
I will not venture to say read, it, I have never 
thoroughly understood. But taken in conjunction 
with the many proofs which have since been given 
of a revival of speculation, speculation too of a free 
kind, in many quarters, and above all (where at one 



SYSTEM OF LOGIC. 225 

time I sliould have least expected it) in the Uni- 
versities, the fact becomes partially inteUigible. I 
have never indulged the illusion that the book had 
made any considerable impression on philosophical 
opinion. The German, or a priori view of human 
knowledge, and of the knowing faculties, is likely for 
some time longer (though it may be hoped in a 
diminishing degree) to predominate among those who 
occupy themselves with such inquiries, both here and 
on the Continent. But the '' System of Logic " 
supphes what was much wanted, a text-book of the 
opposite doctrine— that which derives all knowledge 
from experience, and aU moral and intellectual 
qualities principally from the direction given to the 
associations. I make as humble an estimate as any- 
body of what either an analysis of logical processes, 
or any possible canons of evidence, can do by them- 
jselves, towards guiding or rectifying the operations 
of the understanding. Combined with other re- 
quisites, I certainly do think them of great use ; 
but whatever may be the practical value of a true 
philosophy of these matters, it is hardly possible to 
exaggerate the mischiefs of a false one. The 
notion that truths external to the mind may be 
known by intuition or consciousness, independently 
of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in 
these times, the great intellectual support of false 
doctrines and bad institutions. By the aid of this 

Q 



226 COMPLETION OF THE 

theory, every inveterate belief and every intense 
feeling, of which the origin is not remembered, is 
enabled to dispense with the obligation of justifying 
itself by reason, and is erected into its own all- 
sufficient voucher and justification. There never 
was such an instrument devised for consecrating all 
deep-seated prejudices. And the chief strength of 
this false philosophy in morals, politics, and religion, 
lies in the appeal which it is accustomed to make to 
the evidence of mathematics and' of the cognate 
branches of physical science. To expel it from these, 
is to drive it from its stronghold : and because this 
had never been effectually done, the intuitive school, 
even after what my father had written in his Analysis 
of the Mind, had in appearance, and as far as 
published writings were concerned, on the whole the 
best of the argument. In attempting to clear up the 
real nature of the evidence of mathematical and 
physical truths, the " System of Logic " met the 
intuitive philosophers on ground on which they had 
previously been deemxcd unassailable ; and gave its 
own explanation, from experience and association, 
of that peculiar character of what are called necessary 
truths, which is adduced as proof that their evidence 
must come from a deeper source than experience. 
Whether this has been done effectually, is still sub 
j II dice ; and even then, to deprive a mode of thought so 
stroll gl}- rooted in human prejudices and partialities, 



SYSTEM OF LOGIC. 227 

of its mere speculative support, goes but a very little 
v^ay towards overcoming it ; but though only a step, 
it is a quite indispensable one ; for since, after all, 
prejudice can only be successfully combated by 
philosophy, no v^ay can really be made against it 
permanently until it has been shown not to have 
philosophy on its side. 

Being now released from any active concern in 
temporary politics, and from any literary occupation 
involving personal communication with contributors 
and others, I was enabled to indulge the inclination, 
natural to thinking persons when the age of boyish 
vanity is once past, for limiting my own society to 
a very few persons. General society, as now carried 
on in England, is so insipid an aifau", even to the 
persons who make it what it is, that it is kept up 
for any reason rather than the pleasure it affords. 
All serious discussion on matters on which opinions 
differ, being considered ill-bred, and the national 
deficiency in liveliness and sociability having pre- 
vented the cultivation of the art of talking agreeably 
on trifles, in which the French of the last century so 
much excelled, the sole attraction of what is called 
society to those who are not at the top of the tree, is 
the hope of being aided to climb a little higher in it ; 
while to those who are already at the top, it is chiefly 
a compliance with custom, and with the supposed 
requirements of their station. To a person of any 

Q 2 



228 GENERAL VIEW OF 

but a very common order in tlionglit or feeling, such 
society, unless he has personal objects to serve by it, 
must be supremely unattractive : and most people, 
in the present day, of any really high class, of in- 
tellect, make their contact with it so slight, and at 
such long intervals, as to be almost considered as 
retiring from it altogether. Those persons of any 
mental superiority who do otherwise, are, almost 
without exception, greatly deteriorated by it. Not 
to mention loss of time, the tone of their feelings is 
lowered : they become less in earnest about those of 
their opinions respecting which they must remain 
silent in the society they frequent : they come to 
look upon their most elevated objects as unpractical, 
or, at least, too remote from realization to be more 
than a vision, or a theory ; and if, more fortunate 
than most, they retain their higher principles unim- 
paired, yet with respect to the persons and affairs of 
their own day they insensibly adopt the modes of 
feeling and judgment in which they can hope for 
sympathy from the company they keep. A person 
of high intellect should never go into unintellectual 
society unless he can enter it as an apostle ; yet he 
is the only person with high objects who can safely 
enter it at all. Persons even of intellectual aspira- 
tions had much better, if they can, make their 
habitual associates of at least their equals, and, as 
far as possible, their superiors, in knowledge, Intel- 



THE REMAINDER OF MY LIFE. 229 

lect, and elevation of sentiment. Moreover, if the 
character is formed, and the mind made up, on the 
few cardinal points of human opinion, agreement of 
conviction and feeling on these, has been felt in all 
times to be an essential requisite of anything 
worthy the name of friendship, in a really earnest 
mind. All these circumstances united, made the 
number very small of those w;hose society, and 
still more whose intimacy, I now voluntarily 
sought. 

Among these, the principal was the incomparable 
friend of whom I have already spoken. At this 
period she lived mostly with one young daughter, 
in a quiet part of the country, and only occasionally 
in town, with her first husband, Mr. Taylor. I 
visited her equally in both places ; and was greatly 
indebted to the strength of character which enabled 
her to disregard the false interpretations liable to be 
put on the frequency of my visits to her while living 
generally apart from Mr. Taylor, and on our occa- 
sionally travelling together, though in all other 
respects our conduct during those years gave not 
the slightest ground for any other supposition than 
the true one, that our relation to each other at that 
time was one of strong affection and confidential 
intimacy only. For though we did not consider the 
ordinances of society binding on a subject so entirely 
personal, we did feel bound that our conduct should 



230 GENEP.AL VIEW OF 

1)6 sucli as in no degree to bring discredit on her 
liusband, nor therefore on herself. 

In this third period (as it may be termed) of my 
mental progress, which now went hand in hand with 
liers, my opinions gained equally in breadth and 
depth, I understood more things, and those which I 
had understood before, I now understood more 
thoroughly. I had now comj)letely turned back 
from what there had been of excess in my reaction 
against Benthamism. I had, at the height of that 
reaction, certainly become much more indulgent to 
the common opinions of society and the world, and 
more willing to be content with seconding the super- 
ficial improvement which had begun to take place 
in those common opinions, than became one whose 
convictions, on so many points, differed fundamentally 
from them. I was much more inclined, than I can 
now approve, to put in abeyance the more decidedly 
heretical part of my opinions, which I now look upon 
as almost the only ones, the assertion of which tends 
in any way to regenerate society. But in addition 
to this, our opinions were far more heretical than 
mine had been in the days of my most extrem.e 
Benthamism. In those days I had seen little further 
than the old school of political economists into the 
possibilities of % fundamental improvement in social 
arrangements. Private property, as now understood, 
and inheritance, appeared to me, as to them, tlie 



THE REMAINDER OF MY LIFE. 231 

dernier mot of legislation : and I looked no furtliei 
than to mitigating the inequalities consequent on 
these institutions, by getting rid of primogeniture 
and entails. The notion that it was possible to go 
further than this in removing the injustice — for in- 
justice it is, whether admitting of a complete remedy 
or not — involved in the fact that some are born 
to riches and the vast majority to poverty, I then 
reckoned chimerical, and only hoped that by uni- 
versal education, leading to voluntary restraint on 
population, the portion of the poor might be made 
more tolerable. In short, I was a democrat, but 
not the least of a Socialist. We were now much 
less democrats than I had been, because so long as 
education continues to be so wretchedly i)}iperfect5 
we dreaded the ignorance and especially the selfish- 
ness and brutality of the mass : but our ideal of ulti- 
mate improvement went far beyond Democracy, and 
would class us decidedly under the general designation 
of Sociahsts. While we repudiated with the greatest 
energy that tyranny of society over the individual 
which most Socialistic systems are supposed to involve, 
we yet looked forward to a time when society will no 
longer be divided into the idle and the industrious ; 
when the rule that they who do not work shall not 
eat, will be applied not to paupers' only, but impar- 
tially to all ; when the division of the produce of 
labour, instead of depending, as in so great a degree 



232 GENERAL VIEW OF 

it now does, on the accident of birtli, will be made by 
concert on an acknowledged principle of justice ; 
and when it will no longer either be, or be thought 
to be, impossible for human beings to exert them- 
selves strenuously in procuring benefits which are 
not to be exclusively their own, but to be shared 
with the society they belong to. The social problem 
of the future we considered to be, how to unite the 
greatest individual liberty of action, with a common 
ownership in the raw material of the globe, and an 
equal participation of all in the benefits of combined 
labour. We had not the presumption to suppose 
tliat we could already foresee, by what precise form 
of institutions these objects could most effectually be 
attained, or at how near or how distant a period 
they would become practicable. We saw clearly 
that to render any such social transformation either 
possible or desirable, an equivalent change of 
character must take place both in the uncultivated 
herd who now compose the labouring masses, and in 
the immense majority of their employers. Both these 
classes must learn by practice to labour and combine 
for generous, or at all events for public and social 
purposes, and. not, as hitherto, solely for narrowly 
interested ones. But the capacity to do this has 
always existed in mankind, and is not, nor is ever 
likely to be, extinct. Education, habit, and the culti- 
vation of the sentiments, will make a common man 



THE HEMAINDER OF MY LIFE. 233 

dig or weave for his country, as readily as fight for 
his country. True enough, it is only by slow degrees, 
and a system of culture prolonged through successive 
generations, that men in general can be brought up 
to this point. But the hindrance is not in the 
essential constitution of human nature. Interest in 
the common good is at present so weak a motive in 
the generality, not because it can never be other- 
wise, but because the mind is not accustomed/ to 
dwell on it as it dwells from mornmg till night on 
things which tend only to personal advantage. When 
called into activity, as only self-interest now is, by the 
daily course of life, and spurred from behind by the 
love of distinction and the fear of shame, it is capable 
of producing, even in common men, the most strenuous 
exertions as well as the most heroic sacrifices. The 
deep-rooted selfishness which forms the general 
character of the existing state of society, is so deeply 
rooted, only because the whole course of existing 
institutions tends to foster it ; and modern institutions 
in some respects m^ore than ancient, since the occa- 
sion on which the individual is called on to do any- 
thing for the public without receiving its pay, are 
far less frequent in modern life, than in the smaller 
commonwealths of antiquity. These considerations 
did not make us overlook the folly of premature 
attempts to dispense with the inducements of pri- 
vate interest in social affairs, while no substitute for 



234 PUBLICATION OF THE 

tliem has been or can be provided : but we regarded 
all existing institutions and social arrangements as 
being (in a pbrase I once beard from Austin) " merely 
provisional," and we welcomed with the greatest 
pleasure and interest all socialistic experiments by 
select individuals (such as the Co-operative Societies), 
which, whether they succeeded or failed, could not 
but operate as a most useful education of those who 
took part in them, by cultivating their capacity 
of acting upon motives pointing directly to the general 
good, or making them aware of the defects which 
render them and others incapable of doing so. 

In the " Principles of Political Economy," these 
opinions were promulgated, less clearly and fully in 
the first edition, rather more so in the second, and 
quite unequivocally in the third. The difference 
arose partly from the change of times, the first edition 
having been written and sent to press before the' 
French Revolution of 1848, after which the public 
mind became more open to the reception of novelties 
in opinion, and doctrines appeared moderate which 
would have been thought very starthng a short time 
before. In the first edition the difficulties of 
socialism were stated so strongly, that the tone was 
on the whole that of opposition to it. In the year or 
two which followed, much time was given to the 
study of the best Socialistic writers on the Continent, 
and to meditation and discussion on the whole range 



PEINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. 235 

of topics involved in tlie controversy : and the result 
was that most of wliat had been written on the 
subject in the first edition was cancelled, and replaced 
by arguments and reflections which represent a moi-e 
advanced opinion. ' 

The Political Economy was far more rapidly 
executed than the Logic, or indeed than anything 
of importance which I had previously written. It 
was commenced in the autumn of 1845, and was 
ready for the press before the end of 1847. In this 
period of little more than two years there was an 
interval of six months during which the work was 
laid aside, while I was v/riting articles in the Morning 
Chronicle (which unexpectedly entered warmly into 
my purpose) urging the formation of peasant proper- 
ties on the waste lands of Ireland. This was during 
the period of the Famine, the winter of 1846-47, 
when the stern necessities of the time seemed to 
afford a- chance of gaining attention for what appeared 
to me the only mode of combining relief to immediate 
destitution with permanent improvement of the 
social and economical condition of the Irish people. 
But the idea was new and strange ; there was no 
English precedent for such a proceeding : and the 
profound ignorance of English politicians and the 
English public concerning all social phenomena not 
generally met with in England (however common 
elsewhere), made my' endeavours an entire failure. 



236 PUBLICATION OF THE 

Instead of a great operation on the waste lands, and 
tlie conversion of cottiers into proprietors, Parliament 
passed a Poor Law for maintaining them as paupers : 
and if the nation has not since found itself in inex- 
tricable difficulties from the joint operation of the 
old evils and the quack remedy, it is indebted for its 
deliverance to that most unexpected and surprising 
fact, the depopulation of Ireland, commenced by 
famine, and continued by emigration. 

The rapid success of the Political Economy showed 
that the public wanted, and were prepared for such 
a book. Published early in 1848, an edition of a 
thousand copies was sold in less than a year. Another 
similar edition was published in the spring of 1849 ; 
and a third, of 1250 copies, early in 1852. It was, 
from the first, continually cited and referred to as 
an authority, because it was not a book merely of 
abstract science, but also of application, and treated 
Political Economy not as a thing by itself, but as a 
fragment 'of a greater whole ; a branch of Social 
Philosophy, so interlinked with all the other 
branches, that its conclusions, even in its own pecu- 
liar province, are only true conditionally, subject to 
interference and counteraction from causes not 
directly within its scope : while to the character of 
a practical guide it has no pretension, apart from 
other classes of considerations. Political Economy, 
in truth, has never pretended to give a^dvice to 



PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. 237 

mankind with no lights but its own ; though people 
who knew nothing but political economy (and there- 
fore knew that ill) have taken upon themselves to 
advise, and could only do so by such lights as they 
had. Bat the numerous sentimental enemies of 
political economy, and its still more numerous in- 
terested enemies in sentimental guise, have been 
very successful in gaining belief for this among other 
unmerited imputations against it, and the " Princi- 
ples" having, in spite of the freedom of many of its 
opinions, become for the present the most popular 
treatise on the subject, has helped to disarm the 
enemies of so important a study. The amount of its 
worth as an exposition of the science, and the value 
of the different applications which it suggests, others 
of course must judge. 

For a considerable time after this, I published no 
work of magnitude ; though I still occasionally wrote 
in periodicals, and my correspondence (much of it 
with persons quite unknown to me), on subjects of 
public interest, swelled to a considerable bulk. 
During these years I wrote or commenced various 
Essays, for eventual publication, on some of the fun- 
damental questions of human and social life, with 
regard to several of which I have already much 
exceeded the severity of the Horatian precept. I 
continued to watch with keen interest the progress 
of public events. But it was not, on the whole, 



238 GENERAL VIEW OF 

very encouraging to me. The European reaction 
after 1848, and the success of an unprincipled 
usurper in December, 1851, put an end, as it seemed, 
to all present hope of freedom or social improvement 
in France and the Continent. In England, I had 
seen and continued to see many of the opinions of 
my youth obtain general recognition, and many of 
the reforms in institutions, for which I had through 
life contended, either effected or in course of beino- 
so. But these changes had been attended with 
much less benefit to human well-being than I should 
formerly have anticipated, because they had produced 
very little improvement in that which all real amelio- 
ration in the lot of mankind depends on, their 
intellectual and moral state : and it might even be 
questioned if the various causes of deterioration 
Wiich had been at work in the meanwhile, had not 
more than counterbalanced the tendencies to improve- 
ment. I had learnt from experience that many false 
opinions may be exchanged for true ones, without in 
the least altering the habits of mind of which false 
opinions are the result. The English public, for 
example, are quite as raw and undiscerning on 
subjects of political economy since the nation has 
been converted to free-trade, as they were before ; 
and are still further from having acquired better 
habits of thought or feeling, or being in any way 
better fortified against error, on subjects of a more 
elevated character. For, though they have thrown 



THE r.EMAINDER OF MY LIFE. 239 

off certain errors, the general discipline of tlieir 
minds, intellectually and morally, is not altered. 1 
am now convinced, that no great improvements in 
the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change 
takes place in the fundamental constitution of their 
modes of thought. The old opinions in religion, 
morals, and politics, are so much discredited in the 
more intellectr*:! minds as to have lost the greater 
part of their efficacy for good, while they have stiU 
life enough in them to be a powerful obstacle to the 
growing up of any better opinions on those subjects. 
Y/hen the philosophic minds of the world can no 
longer believe its religion, or can only believe it witl 
modifications amounting to an essential change of its 
character, a transitional period commences, of weak 
convictions, paralysed intellects, and growing laxity 
of principle, whicii cannot terminate until a renova- 
tion has been effected in the basis of their belief, 
leading to the evolution of some faith, whether 
religious or merely human, which they can really 
believe : and when things are in this state, all tliinV- 
ing or writing which does not tend to promote such 
a renovation, is of very little value beyond the 
moment. Since there was little in the apparent 
condition of the public mind, indicative of any ten- 
dency in this direction, mxy view of the immediate 
prospects of human improvement was not sa.nguine. 
More recently a spirit of free speculation has sprung 
up, giving a more encouraging prospect of the gradual 



240 MARRIAGE. 

mental emancipation of England ; and concurring with 
tlie renewal under better auspices, of the movement 
for political freedom in the rest of Europe, has given 
to the present condition of human affairs a more 
hopeful aspect.* 

Between the time of which I have now spoken, 
and the present, took place the most important 
events of my private life. The first of these was my 
marriage, in April, 1851, to the lady whose incom- 
parable worth had made her friendship the greatest 
source to me both of happiness and of improvement, 
during many years in which we never expected to 
be in any closer relation to one another. Ardently 
as I should have aspired to this complete union of 
our hves at any time in the course of my existence 
at which it had been practicable, I, as much as my 
wife, would far rather have foregone that privilege 
for ever, than have owed it to the premature death 
of one for whom I had the sincerest respect, and she 
the strongest affection. That event, however, having 
taken place in July, 1849, it was granted to me to 
derive from that evil my own greatest good, by 
adding to the partnership of thought, feeling, and 
writing which had long existed, a partnership of our 
entire existence. For seven and a-half years that 
blessing was mine ; for seven and a-half only ! I 



Written about 1861, 



MArtRIAGE. 241 

can say notliing which could describe, even in the 
famtest manner, what that loss was and is. But 
because I know that she would have wished it, I 
endeavour to make the best of what life I have left, 
and to work on for her purposes with such diminished 
strength as can be derived from thoughts of her, and 
communion with her memory. 

When two persons have their thoughts and specu- 
lations completely in common ; when all subjects of 
intellectual or moral interest are discussed between 
them in daily hfe, and probed to much greater 
depths than are usually or conveniently sounded in 
writings intended for general readers ; when they set 
out from the same principles, and arrive at their 
conclusions by processes pursued jointly, it is of 
little consequence in respect to the question of origi- 
nahty, which of them holds the pen ; the one who 
contributes least to the composition may contribute 
most to the thought ; the writings which result are 
the joint product of both, and it must often be im- 
possible to disentangle their respective parts, and 
affirm that this belongs to one and that to the other. 
In this wide sense, not only during the years of our 
married life, but during many of the ye.js of con- 
fidential friendship which preceded, all my published 
writings were as mach her work as mine ; her share 
in them constantly increasing as years advanced. 
But in certain cases, what belongs to her can be> 



242 MAKRIAGE. 

distinguislied, and specially identified. Over and 
above the general influence which her mind had over 
mine, the most valuable ideas and features in these 
joint productions — those which have been most fruit- 
ful of important results, and have contributed most 
to the success and reputation of the works them- 
selves — originated with her, were emanations from 
her mind, my part in them being no greater than in 
any of the thoughts which I found in previous 
writers, and made my own only by incorporating 
them with my own system of thought. During the 
greater part of my literary life I have performed the 
oflice in relation to her, which from a rather early 
period I had considered as the most useful part that 
I was qualified to take in the domain of thought, 
that of an interpreter of original thinkers, and 
mediator between them and the public ; for I had 
always a humble opinion of my own powers as an 
original thinker, except in abstract science (logic, 
metaphysics, and the theoretic principles of pohtical 
economy and politics), but thought myself much 
superior to most of my contemporaries in willing- 
ness and ability to learn from everybody ; as I found 
hardly any one who made such a point of examining 
what was said in defence of all opinions, however 
new or however old, in the conviction that even if 
they were errors there might be a substratum of 
tiHith underneath them, and that in any case the 



MAKRIAGE. 243 

discovery of wliat it was that made tliem plausible, 
would be a benefit to truth. I had, in consequence, 
marked this out as a sphere of usefulness in which I 
was under a special obligation to make myself active : 
the more so, as the acquaintance I had formed with 
the ideas of the Coleridgians, of the German thinkers, 
and of Carlyle, all of them fiercely opposed to the 
mode of thought in which I had been brought up, 
had convinced me that along with much error they 
possessed much truth, which was veiled from minds 
otherwise capable of receiving it by the transcen- 
dental and mystical phraseology in which they were 
accustomed to shut it up, and from which they 
neither cared, nor knew how, to disengage it ; and I 
did not despair of separating the truth from the 
error, and exposing it in terms which would be 
intelligible and not repulsive to those on my own 
side in philosophy. Thus prepared, it will easily be 
believed that when I came into close intellectual 
communion with a person of the most eminent 
faculties, whose genius, as it grew and unfolded 
itself in thought, continually struck out truths far 
in advance of me, but in which I could not, as I had 
done in those others, detect any mixture of error, 
the greatest part of my mental growth consisted in 
the assimilation of those truths, and the most 
valuable part of my intellectual work was in 
building the bridges and clearing the paths which 

n 2 



244 MARRIAGE, 

connected them with my general system of 
thought/'^ 

The first of my books in which her share was con- 
spicuous was the " Principles of Political Economy." 
The '' System of Logic " owed little to her except in 
the minuter matters of composition, in which respect 



* The steps in my mental growth, for which I was indebted to her were 
far from being those which a person wholly nninformed on the subject 
would probably suspect. It might be supposed, for instance, that my 
strong convictions on the complei e equality in all legal, political, social 
and domestic relations, which ought to exist between men and women, 
may have been adopted or learnt from her. This was so far from being 
the fact, that those convictions were among the earliest results of the ap- 
plication of my mind to political subjects, and the strength with which 
I held them was, as I believe, more than anything else, the originating 
cause of the interest she felt in me. What is true is, that until I knew 
her, the opinion was in my mind, little more than an abstract principle. 
I saw no more reason why women should be held in legal subjection to 
other people, than why men should. I was certain that their interests 
required fully as much protection as those of men, and were quite as 
little likely to obtain it without an equal voice in making the laws 
by which tbey were to be bound. But that perception of the vast 
practical bearings of women's disabilities which found expression in 
the book on the " Subjection of Women'' was acquired mainly through 
her teaching. But for her rare knowledge of human nature and com- 
prehension of moral and social influences, though I should doubtless 
have held my present opinions, I should have had a very insufftcient 
perception of the mode in which the consequences of the inferior position 
of women intertwine themselves with all the evils of existing society 
and with all the difficulties of human imi^rovement. I am indeed pain- 
fully conscious of how much of her best thoughts on the subject I 
have failed to rei:>rouuce, and how greatly that little treatise falls 
short of what would have been if she had put on paper her entire 
nilud on this question, or had lived to revise and improve, as she 
ccitainly would have done, my imperfect slalement of the catic. 



MARRIAGE. 245 

my TmtiDgs, both great and small, Kave largely 
benefited by her accurate and clear-sighted criticism.^ 
The chapter of the Political Economy which has had 
a greater influence on opinion than all the rest, that 
on ''the Probable Future of the Labouring Classes," 
is entirely due to her : in the first draft of the book, 
that chapter did not exist. She pointed out the 
need of such a chapter, and the extreme imperfection 
of the book without it : she was the cause of my 
writing it ; and the more general part of the chapter, 
the statement and discussion of the two opposite 
theories respecting the proper condition of the 
labouring classes, was wholly an exposition of her 



* The only person from wliom I received any direct assistance in 
the preparation of the System of Logic was Mr. Bain, since so justly 
celebrated for his philosophical writings. He went carefully through 
the manuscript before it was sent to press, and enriched it with a 
great number of additional examples and illustrations from science ; 
many of which, as well as some detached remarks of his own in con- 
firmation of ray logical views, I inserted nearly in his own words. 

My obligations to Comte were only to his writings — to the part 
which had then been published of his *' Systeme de Philosophic 
Positive :" and, as has been seen from what T have already said in this 
narrative, the amount of these obligations is far less than has some- 
times been asserted. The first volume, which contains all the funda- 
mental doctrines of the book, was substantially complete oefore I had 
seen Comte's treatise. I derived from him many valuable thoughts, 
conspicuously in the chapter on Hypotheses and in the view taken 
of the logic of Algebra : but it is only in the concluding Book, on the 
Logic of the Moral Sciences, that I owe to him any radical improve- 
ment in my conception of the application of logical method. This 
improvement I have stated and characterized in a former part of the 
preseat Memoir. 



246 MARRIAGE. 

tliouglits, often in words taken from her own lips. 
The purely scientific part of the Political Economy I 
did not learn from her ; but it was chiefly her in- 
fluence that gave to the book that general tone by 
which it is distinguished from all previous exposi- 
tions of Political Economy that had any pretension 
to being scientific, and which has made it so useful 
in conciliating minds which those previous exposi- 
tions had repelled. This tone consisted chiefly in 
making the proper distinction between the laws of 
the Production of Wealth, which are real laws of 
nature, dependent on the properties of objects, and 
tlie modes of its Distribution, which, subject to cer- 
tain couditions, depend on human will. The comimon 
run of political economists confuse these together, 
under the designation of economic laws, which they 
deem incapable of being defeated or modified by 
human effort ; ascribing the same necessity to things 
dependent on the unchangeable conditions of our 
earthly existence, and to those which, being but the 
necessary consequences of particular social arrange- 
ments, are merely co-extensive with these : given 
certain institutions and customs, wages, profits, and 
rent will be determined by certain causes ; but this 
class of political economists drop the indispensable 
presupposition, and argue that these causes must, by 
an inherent necessity, against which no human means 
can avail, determine the shares which fall, in the 



MARRIAGE. 247 

division of the produce, to labourers, capitalists, and 
landlords. The " Principles of Political Economy " 
yielded to none of its predecessors in aiming at the 
scientific appreciation of the action of these causes, 
under the conditions which they presuppose ; but it 
set the example of not treating those conditions as 
final. The economic generalizations which depend, 
not on necessities of nature but on those combined 
with the existing arrangements of society, it deals 
with only as provisional, and as liable to be much 
altered by the progress of social improvement. I 
had indeed partially learnt this view of things from 
the thoughts awakened in me by the speculations of 
the St. Simonians ; but it was made a living prin- 
ciple pervading and animating the book by my wife's 
promptings. This example illustrates well the 
general character of what she contributed to my 
writings. What was abstract and purely scientific 
was ' generally mine ; the properly human element 
came from her : in all that concerned the application 
of philosophy to the exigencies of human society 
and progress, I was her pupil, alike in boldness of 
speculation and cautiousness of practical judgment. 
For, on the one hand, she was much more courageous 
and far-sighted than without her I should have been, 
in anticipations of an order of things to come, in 
which many of the limited generalizations now so 
often confounded with universal principles will cease 



248 BETmEMENT FROM 

to be applicable. Those parts of my writings, and 
especially of tbe Political Economy, wliicli con- 
template possibilities in the future such as, when 
affirmed by socialists, have in general been fiercely 
denied by poHtical economists, would, but for her, 
either have been absent, or the suggestions would 
have been made much more timidly and in a more 
qualified form. But while she thus rendered me 
bolder in speculation on human afiairs, her practical 
turn of mind, and her almost unerring estimate of 
practical obstacles, repressed in me all tendencies 
that were really visionary. Her mind invested all 
ideas in a concrete shape, and formed to itself a 
conception of how they would actually work : and 
her knowledge of the existing feelings and conduct 
of mankind was so seldom at fault, that the weak 
point in any unworkable suggestion seldom escaped 
her.* 

During the years which intervened between the 
commencement of my married life and the cata- 
strophe which closed it, the principal occurrences of 
my outward existence (unless I count as such a first 
attack of the family disease, and a consequent journey 
of more than six months for the recovery of health, in 



* A few dedicatory lines acknowledging what the book OAved to her, 
were prefixed to some of the presentation copies of the Politiccil 
Economy on its first publication. Her dislike of publicity alone pre- 
vented their insertion in the other copies of the work. 



THE INDIA HOUSE. 249 

Italy, Sicily, and Greece) had- reference to my posi- 
tion in the India House. In 1856 I was promoted 
to the rank of chief of the office in which I had 
served for upwards of thirty-three years. The ap- 
pointment, that of Examiner of India Correspondence, 
was the highest, next to that of Secretary, in the 
East India Company's home service, involving the 
general superintendence of all the correspondence 
with the Indian Governments, except the military, 
naval, and financial. I held this office as long as it 
continued to exist, being a little more than two 
years ; after which it pleased Parliament, in other 
words Lord Palmerston, to put an end to the East 
India Company as a branch of the Government of 
India under the Crown, and convert the adminis- 
tration of that country into a thing to be scrambled 
for by the second and third class of English parlia- 
mentary politicians. I was the chief manager of the 
resistance which the Company made to their own 
political extinction, and to the letters and petitions 
I wrote for them, and the concluding chapter of my 
treatise on Hepresentative Government, I must refer 
for my opinions on the folly and mischief of tliis ill- 
considered change. Personally I considered myself 
a gainer by it, as I had given enough of my life to 
India, and was not uawilling to retire on the hberal 
compensation granted. After the change was con- 
summated, Lord Stanley, the First Secretary of 



250 BETIREMENT FHOM 

State for India, made me the honourable offer of 
a seat in the Council, and the proposal was subse- 
quently renewed by the Council itself, on the first 
occasion of its having to supply a vacancy in its own 
body. But the conditions of Indian Government 
under the new system made me anticipate nothing 
but useless vexation and waste of effort from any 
participation in it : and nothing that has since hap- 
pened has had any tendency to make me regret my 
refusal. 

During the two years which immediately preceded 
the cessation of my official hfe, my wife and I were 
working together at the " Liberty." I had first 
planned and written it as a short essay in 1854. It 
was in mounting the steps of the Capitol, in January, 
1855, that the thought first arose of converting it 
into a volume. None of my writings have been 
either so carefuUy composed, or so sedulously cor- 
rected as this. After it had been written as usual 
twice over, we kept it by us, bringing it out from 
time to time, and going through it de novo, reading, 
weighing, and criticising every sentence. Its final 
revision was to have been a work of the winter of 
1858-9, the first after my retirement, which we had 
arranged to pass in the South of Europe. That 
hope and every other were frustrated by the most 
unexpected and bitter calamity of her death — at 
Avignon, on our way to Montpellier, from a sudden 
attack of pulmonary congestion. 



THE INDIA HOUSE. 251 

Since tlien I have sought for such alleviation as 
Tcnj state admitted of, bj the mode of life which 
most enabled me to feel her still near me. I bought 
a cottage as close as possible to the place where she 
is buried, and there her daughter (my fellow- 
sufferer and now my chief comfort) and I, live 
constantly during a great portion of the year. My 
objects in life are solely those which were hers ; my 
pursuits and occupations those in which she shared, 
or sympathized, and which are indissolubly asso- 
ciated with her. Her memory is to me a religioUj 
and her approbation the standard by which, sum- 
ming up as it does all worthiness, I endeavour to 
regulate my life.'"' 

After my irreparable loss, one of my earhest cares 
was to print and pubhsh the treatise, so much of 
which was the work of her whom I had lost, and 
consecrate it to her memory. I have made no altera- 
tion or addition to it, nor shall I ever. Though it 
wants the last touch of her hand, no substitute for 
that touch shall ever be attempted by mine. 

The " Liberty" was more directly and literally our 
joint production than anything else which bears my 
name, for there was not a sentence of it which was 
not several times gone through by us together, turned 
over in many ways, and carefully weeded of any 



* Wliat precedes was written or revised previous to, or during the 
year 1861. What follows was written in 1870. 



252 PUBLICATION OF 

faults, eitlier in thought or expression, that we 
detected in it. It is in consequence of this that, 
although it never underwent her final revision, it far 
surpasses, as a mere specimen of composition, anything 
which has proceeded from me either before or since. 
With regard to the thoughts, it is difficult to identify 
any particular part or element as being more hers 
than all the rest. The whole mode of thinking of 
which the book was the expression, was emphatically 
hers. But I also was so thoroughly imbued with it, 
that the same thoughts naturally occurred to us 
both. That I was thus penetrated with it, however, 
I owe in a great degree to her. There was a moment 
in my mental progress when I might easily have 
fallen into a tendency towards over-government, both 
social and political; as there was also a moment 
when, by reaction from a contrary excess, I might 
have become a less thorough radical and democrat 
than I am. In both these points, as in many others, 
she benefited me as much by keeping me right where 
I was right, as by leading me to new truths, and 
ridding me of errors. My great readiness and eager- 
ness to learn from everybody, and to make room in 
my opinions for every new acquisition by adjusting 
the old and the new to one another, might, but for 
her steadjrLng influence, have seduced me into 
modifying my early opinions too much. She was 
in nothing more valuable to my mental development 



it XXl-,T^T^mT^ »> 



LIBEKTY. 253 

tlian by her just measure of the relative importance 
of. different considerations, which often protected me 
from allowing to truths I had only recently learnt to 
see, a more important place in my thoughts than was 
properly their due. 

The " Liberty" is likely to survive longer than 
anything else that I have written (with the possible 
exception of the " Logic"), because the conjunction 
of her mind with mine has rendered it a kind of 
philosophic text-book of a single truth, which the 
changes progressively taking place m modern society 
tend to bring out into ever stronger relief -fthe impor- 
tance, to man and society, of a large variety in types 
of character, and of giving full freedom to human 
nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflicting 
directions. Nothing can better show how deep are 
the foundations of this truth, than the great impres- 
sion made by the exposition of it at a time which, 
to superficial observation, did not seem to stand 
much in need of such a lesson. The fears we ex- 
pressed, lest the inevitable growth of social equality 
and of the government of public opinion, should 
impose on mankind an oppressive joke, of uniformity 
in opinion and practice, might easily have appeared 
chimerical to those who looked more at present facts 
than at tendencies ; for the gradual revolution that is 
taking place in society and institutions has, thus far, 
been decidedly favourable to the development of new 



254 PUBLICATION OF 

opinions, and has procured for them a mucli more un- 
prejudiced hearing tlian they previously met with. 
But this is a feature belonging to periods of transition, 
when old notions and feelings have been unsettled, 
and no new doctrines have yet succeeded to their 
ascendancy. At such times people of any mental 
activity, having given up their old beliefs, and not 
feeling quite sure that those they still retain can 
stand unmodified, listen eagerly to new opinions. 
But this state of things is necessarily transitory : 
some particular body of doctrine in time rallies the 
majority round it, organizes social institutions and 
modes of action conformably to itself, education im- 
presses this new creed upon the new generations with- 
out the mental processes that have led to it, and by 
degrees it acquires the very same power of com- 
pression, so long exercised by the creeds of which 
it had taken the place. Whether this noxious power 
will be exercised, depends on whether mankind have 
by that time become aware that it cannot be exercised 
without stunting and dwarfing human nature. It is 
then that the teachings of the " Liberty" will have 
their greatest value. And it is to be feared that they 
will retain that value a long time. 

As regards originality, it has of course no other 
than that which every thoughtful mind gives to its 
own mode of conceiving and expressing truths which 
are common property. /The leading thought of j^he 



« TTTDT^Tim^r " 



LIBERTY. 255 

book is one which though in many ages confined to ! 
insulated thinkers, mankind have probably at no 
time since the beginning of civilization been entirely 
without.^.. To speak only of the last few generations, 
it is distinctly contained in the vein of important 
thought respecting education and culture, spread 
through the European mind by the labours and 
genius of Pestalozzi. The unqualified championship 
of it by Wniielm von Humboldt is referred to in the 
book ; but he by no means stood alone in his own 
country. During the early part of the present 
century the doctrine of the rights of individuahty, 
and the claim of the moral nature to develope itself 
in its ®wn way, was pushed by a whole school of 
German authors even to exaggeration ; and the 
writings of Goethe, the most celebrated of all 
German authors, though not belonging to that or to 
any other school, are penetrated throughout by 
views of morals and of conduct in life, often in my 
opinion not defensible, but which are incessantly 
seeking whatever defence they admit of in the 
theory of the right and duty of self-development. In 
our own country, before the book " On Liberty" 
was written, the doctrine of Individuality had been 
enthusiastically asserted, in a style of vigorous de- 
clamation sometimes reminding one of Fichte, by 
Mr. Wniiam Maccall, in a series of writings of which 
the most elaborate is entitled " Elements of In- 



256 GENERAL VIEW OF 

dividualism :" and a remarkable American, Mr. 
Warren, had formed a System of Society, on the 
foundation of the " Sovereignty of the Individual,'' 
had obtained a number of followers, and had actually 
commenced the formation of a Village Community 
(whether it now exists I know not), which, though 
bearing a superficial resemblance to some of the 
projects of Socialists, is diametrically opposite to 
them in principle, since it recognises no authority 
whatever in Society over the individual, except to 
enforce equal freedom of development for all in- 
dividualities. As the book which bears my name 
claimed no originality for any of its doctrines, and 
was not intended to write their history, the only 
author who had preceded me in their assertion, of 
whom I thought it appropriate to say anything, was 
Humboldt, who furnished the motto to the work ; 
although in one passage I borrowed from the 
Warrenites their phrase, the sovereignty of the in- 
dividual. It is hardly necessary here to remark that 
there are abundant differences in detail, between the 
conception of the doctrine by any of the predecessors I 
have mentioned, and that set forth in the book. 

The pohtical circumstances of the time induced me, 
shortly after, to complete and publish a pamphlet 
("Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform"), part of 
which had been written some years previously, on 
the occasion of one of the abortive Reform Bills, and 



THE REMAINDER OF MY LIFE. 257 

Lad at the time^been approved and revised by her. 
Its principa] features were, hostility to the Ballot (a 
change of opinion in both of us, in which she rather 
preceded me), and a claim of representation for 
minorities ; not, however, at that time going beyond 
the cumulative vote proposed by Mr. Garth Marshall. 
In finishing the pamphlet for pubhcation, with a view 
to the discussions on the Heform Bill of Lord Derby's 
and Mr. Disraeh's government in 1859, I added a 
third feature, a plurality of votes, to be given, not to 
property, but to proved superiority of education. 
This recommended itself to me as a means of re- 
conciling the irresistible claim of every man or 
woman to be consulted, and to be allowed a voice, in 
the regulation of affairs which vitally concern them, 
with the superiority of weight justly due to 
opinions grounded on superiority of knowledge. 
The suggestion, however, was one which I had never 
discussed with my almost infaUible counsellor, and I 
have no evidence that she would have concurred in 
it. As far as I have been able to observe, it has 
found favour with nobody ; all who desire any sort 
of inequality in the electoral vote, desiring it in 
favour of property and not of intelligence or know- 
ledo^e. If it ever overcomes the strono- feeling^ which 
exists against it, this will only be after the establish- 
ment of a systematic National Education by which 
the various grades of politically valuable acquireraent 

s 



258 GENERAL VIEW OF 

may be accurately defined and anthenticated. 
Without this it will always remain liable to strong, 
possibly conclusive, objections ; and with this, it 
would perhaps not be needed. 

It was soon after the publication of " Thoughts on 
Parliamentary Reform," that I became acquainted 
with Mr. Hare's admirable system of Personal 
Representation, which, in its present shape, was then 
for the first time published. I saw in this great 
practical and philosophical idea, the greatest im- 
provement of which the system of representative 
government is susceptible ; an improvement which, 
in the most felicitous manner, exactly meets and 
cures the grand, and what before seemed the inherent, 
defect of the representative system ; that of giving 
to a numerical majority all power, instead of only a 
power proportional to its numbers, and enabling the 
strongest party to exclude all weaker parties from 
making their opinions heard in the assembly of the 
nation, except through such opportunity as may be 
given to them by the accidentally unequal distribu- 
tion of opinions in different localities. To these 
great evils nothing more than very imperfect 
palliations had seemed possible ; but Mr. Hare's 
system affords a radical cure. This great discovery, 
for it is no less, in the political art, inspired me, as I 
believe it has inspired all thoughtful persons who 
have adopted it, with new and more sanguine hopes 



THE iaEMAINDEH OF MY LIFE. 259 

respecting tlie prospects of human society ; by freeing 
the form of pohtical institutions towards which the 
whole civihzed world is manifestly and irresistibly 
tending, from the chief part of what seemed to 
qualify, or render doubtful, its ultimate benefits. 
Minorities, so long as they remain minorities, are, 
and ought to be, outvoted ; but under arrangements 
which enable any assemblage of voters, amounting to 
a certain number, to place in the legislature a repre- 
sentative of its own choice, minorities cannot be 
suppressed. Independent opinions will force their 
way into the council of the nation and make them- 
selves heard there, a thing which often cannot happen 
in the existing forms of representative democracy ; 
and the legislature, instead of being weeded of indi- 
vidual peculiarities and entirely made up of men who 
simply represent the creed of great political or religious 
parties, will comprise a large proportion of the most 
eminent individual minds in the country, placed there, 
without reference to party, by voters who appreciate 
their individual eminence. I can understand that 
persons, otherwise intelligent, should, for want of 
sufficient examination, be repelled from Mr. Hare's 
plan by what they think the complex nature of its 
machinery. But any one who does not feel the want 
which the scheme is intended to supply ; any one 
who throws it over as a mere theoretical subtlety or 
crotchet, tending to no valuable purpose, and un- 

s 2 



260 GENERAL VIEW OF 

worthy of tlie attention of practical men, may be 
pronounced an incompetent statesman, unequal to the 
politics of the future. I mean, unless he is a minister 
or aspires to become one : for we are quite accustomed 
to a minister continuing to profess unqualified hos- 
tility to an improvement almost to the very day when 
his conscience, or his interest, induces him to take it 
up as a public measure, and carry it. 

Had I met with Mr. Hare's system before the 
publication of my pamphlet, I should have given an 
account of it there. Not having done so, I wrote an 
article in Eraser's Magazine (reprinted in my mis- 
cellaneous writings) principally for that purpose, 
though I included in it, along with Mr. Hare's 
book, a review of two other productions on the ques- 
tion of the day ; one of them a pamphlet by my early 
friend, Mr. John Austin, who had in his old age 
become an enemy to all further Parliamentary 
reform ; the other an able and vigorous, though par- 
tially erroneous work by Mr. Lorimer. 

In the course of the same summer I fulfilled a duty 
particularly incumbent upon me, that of helping (by 
an article in the Edinburgh Review) to make known 
Mr. Bain's profound treatise on the Mind, just then 
completed by the publication of its second volume. 
And I carried through the press a selection of my 
minor writings, forming the first two volumes of 
" Dissertations and Discussions." The selection had 



THE REMAINDER OF ]MY LIFE. 261 

been made during my wife's lifetime, but the revision, 
in concert with her, with a view to repubhcation, had 
been barely commenced ; and when I had no longer 
the guidance of her judgment I despaired of pur- 
suing it further, and republished the papers as they 
were, with the exception of striking out such passages 
as were no longer in accordance with my opinions. 
My literary work of the year was terminated with an 
essay in Fraser's Magazine, (afterwards republished 
in the third volume of ** Dissertations and Dis- 
cussions,") entitled " A Few Words on Non-inter- 
vention. " I was prompted to write this paper by a 
desu^e, while vindicating England from the imputa- 
tions commonly brought against her on the Conti- 
nent, of a pecuhar selfishness in matters cf foreign 
policy, to wa.rn Englishmen of the colour given to 
this imputation by the low tone in which English 
statesmen are accustomed to speak of English policy 
as concerned only with English interests, and by the 
conduct of Lord Palmerston at that particular time 
in opposing the Suez Canal : and I took the oppor- 
tunity of expressing ideas which had long been in 
my mmd (some of them generated by my Indian 
experience, and others by the international questions 
which then greatly occupied the European j)ublic), 
respecting the true principles of international mora- 
lity, and the legitimate modifications made in it by 
difference of times and circumstances ; a subject I had 



262 GENERAL VIEW OF 

already, to some extent, discussed in tlie vindication 
of the French Provisional Government of 1848 
aofainst the attacks of Lord Brougham and others, 
which I published at the time in the Westminster 
Be view, and which is reprinted in the '' Disser- 
tations." 

I had now settled, as I believed, for the remainder 
of my existence into a purely literary life ; if that can 
be called literary which continued to be occupied in 
a pre-eminent degree with politics, and not merely 
with theoretical, but practical politics, although a 
great part of the year was spent at a dista-nce of 
many hundred miles from the chief seat of the 
politics of my own country, to which, and primarily 
for which, I wrote. But, in truth, the modern 
facilities of communication have not only removed all 
the disadvantages, to a political v^iter in tolerably 
easy circumstances, of distance from the scene of 
political action, but have converted them into ad- 
vantages. The immediate and regular receipt of 
newspapers and periodicals keeps him au courant of 
even the most temporary politics, and gives him a much 
more correct view of the state and progress of opinion 
than he could acquire by personal contact with indi- 
viduals : for every one's social intercourse is more or 
less limited to particular sets or classes, whose 
impressions and no others reach him through that 
channel ; and experience has taught me that those 



THE REMAINDEE OF MY LIFE. 263 

wlio give their time to the absorbing claims of what 

is called society, not having leisure to keep up a 

large acquaintance with the organs of opinion, remain 

much more ignorant of the general state either of the 

pubhc mind, or of the active and instructed part of 

it, than a recluse who reads the newspapers need be. 

There are, no doubt, disadvantages in too long a 

separation from one's country — ^in not occasionally 

renewing one's impressions of the light in which men 

and things appear when seen from a position in the 

midst of them ; but the deliberate judgment formed 

at a distance, and undisturbed by inequalities of 

perspective, is the most to be depended on, even for 

apphcation to practice. Alternating between the two 

positions, I combined the advantages of both. And, 

though the inspher of my best thoughts was no 

longer with me, I was not alone : she had left a 

daughter, my step-daughter, ^ '^ ^^ 

* 'j'f ^ ^ * * 

"^ * * whose ever growing and 

ripening talents from that day to this have been 

devoted to the same great purposes. ^ "^'^ 

^ •}«• -jf ^ "K- * 

Surely no one ever before was so fortunate, as, after 
such a loss as mine, to draw another prize in the 
lottery of life. ^ ^ ^ * ^ 

^ ^ Whoever, either now or hereafter, 

may think of me and of the work I have done, must 



264 CONSIDERATIONS ON 

never forget that it is the product not of one intellect 

and conscience, but of three. ^ ^ ^ 

ii- -^ ^ -^ ^ ^ 



The work of the years 1860 and 1861 consisted 
chiefly of two treatises, only one of which was in- 
tended for immediate publication. This was the 
" Considerations on Representative Government ;" a 
connected exposition of what, by the thoughts of 
many years, I had come to regard as the best form 
of a popular constitution. Along v^dth as much of the 
general theory of government as is necessary to sup- 
port this particular portion of its practice, the 
volume contains my matured views of the principal 
questions which occupy the present age, within the 
province of purely organic institutions, and raises, by 
anticipation, some other questions to which growing 
necessities will sooner or later compel the attention 
both of theoretical and of practical poHticians. The 
chief of these last, is the distinction between the 
function of making laws, for which a numerous 
popular assembly is radically unfit, and that of 
getting good laws made, which is its proper duty 
and cannot be satisfactorily fulfilled by any other 
authority : and the consequent need of a Legisla- 
tive Commission, as a permanent part of the con- 
stitution of a free country; consisting of a small 
number of highly trained political minds, on whom, 



REPPvESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT. 265 

when Parliament has determined that a law shall 
be made, the task of making it should be devolved ; 
Parliament retaining the power of passing or re- 
jecting the bill when drawn up, but not of altering 
it otherwise than by sending proposed amendments 
to be dealt with by the Commission. The question 
here raised respecting the most important of all 
pubhc functions, that of legislation, is a particular 
case of the great problem of modern political organi- 
zation, stated, I beheve, for the first time in its full 
extent by Bentham, though ia my opinion not 
always satisfactorily resolved by him ; the com- 
bination of complete popular control over public 
afiairs, with the greatest attainable perfection of 
skilled agency. 

The other treatise written at this time is the one 
which was published some years later ''' under the 
title of "The Subjection of Women." It was written 
■^ "^ ^ ^ that there might, in 

any event, be in existence a written exposition of 
my opinions on that great question, as full and con- 
clusive as I could make it. The intention was to 
keep this among other unpublished papers, im- 
proving it from time to time if I was able, and to 
publish it at the time when it should seem likely 
to be most useful. As ultimately published 



* In 1869. 



266 THE CIVIL WAR 

4fr * * -s;- 'J'f % * 

in what was of my own composition, all that is most 
striking and profound belongs to my wife ; coming 
from the fund of thought which had been made 
common to us both, by our innumerable conversa- 
tions and discussions on a topic which filled so large 
a place in our minds. 

Soon after this time I took from their repository 
a portion of the unpublished papers which I had 
written during the last years of our married life, 
and shaped them, with some additional matter, into 
the little work entitled " Utilitarianism ;" which was 
first published, in three parts, in successive numbers 
of Eraser's Magazine, and afterwards reprinted in a 
volume. 

Before this, however, the state of public affairs 
had become extremely critical, by the commence- 
ment of the American civil war. My strongest 
feelings were engaged in this struggle, which, I felt 
from the beginning, was destined to be a turning 
point, for good or evil, of the course of human affairs 
for an indefinite duration. Ha^dng been a deeply 
interested observer of the slavery quarrel in 
America, during the many years that preceded the 
open breach, I knew that it was in all its stages 
an aggressive enterprise of the slave-owners to 
extend the territory of slavery ; under the com- 
bined influences of pecuniary interest, domineering 



. IN AMERICA. 267 

temper, and tlie fanaticism of a class for its class 
privileges, influences so fully and powerfully de- 
picted in the admirable work of my friend Professor 
Cairn es, "The Slave Power." Their success, if they 
succeeded, would be a victory of the powers of evil 
which would give courage to the enemies of progress 
and damp the spirits of its friends all over the 
civilized world, while it would create a formidable 
military power, grounded on the worst and most 
anti-social form of the tyranny of men over men, and, 
by destroying for a long time the prestige of the 
great democratic republic, would give to ail the privi- 
leged classes of Europe a false confidence, probably 
only to be extinguished in blood. On the other 
hand, if the spirit of the North was sufiiciently 
roused to carry the war. to a successful termina- 
tion, and if that termination did not come too soon 
and too easily, I foresaw, from the laws of human 
nature, and the experience of revolutions, that when 
it did come it would in all probability be thorough : 
that the bulk of the Northern population, whose 
conscience had as yet been awakened only to the 
point of resisting the further extension of slavery, 
but whose fidelity to the Constitution of the United 
States made them disapprove of any attempt by the 
Federal Government to interfere with slavery in the 
States where it already existed, would acquire feelings 
of another kind when the Constitution had been 



268 THE CIVIL WAR 

sliaken off hj armed rebellion, would determine to 
have done for ever with the accursed thing, and 
would join their banner with that of the noble body 
of Abolitionists, of whom Garrison was the courageous 
and single-minded apostle, Wendell Phillips the elo- 
quent orator, and John Brown the voluntary martyr. ^^ 
Then, too, the whole mind of the United States 
would be let loose from its bonds, no longer cor- 
rupted by the supposed necessity of apologizing to 
foreigners for the most flagrant of all possible viola- 
tions of the free principles of their Constitution ; 
while the tendency of a fixed state of society to 
stereotype a set of national opinions would be at least 
temporarily checked, and the national mind would 
become more open to the recognition of whatever 
was bad in either the institutions or the customs of 
the people. These hopes, so far as related to slavery, 
have been completely, and in other respects are in 
course of being progressively realized. Foreseeing 
from the first this double set of consequences from 
the success or failure of the rebellion, it may be 
imagined with what feelings I contemplated the 
rush of nearly the whole upper and middle classes 
of my own country, even those who passed for 
Liberals, into a furious pro-Southern partisanship : 



* The saying of this true hero, after his capture, that he was worth 
more for hanging than for any other purpose, reminds one, by its 
combination of wit, wisdom, and self-devotion, of Sir Tiiomas More. 



. IN AMERICA, 269 

tlie working classes, and some of tlie literary and 
scientific men, being almost the sole exceptions to 
the general frenzy. I never before felt so keenly 
liow little permanent improvement bad readied the 
minds of our influential classes, and of what small 
value were the Liberal opinions tbey bad got into 
tbe babit of professing. None of tbe Continental 
Liberals committed tbe same frightful mistake. But 
the generation which had extorted negro emancipa- 
tion from our West India planters had passed away ; 
another had succeeded which had not learnt by 
many years of discussion and exposure to feel 
strongly the enormities of slavery ; and the in- 
attention habitual with Englishmen to whatever is 
going on in the world outside their own island, 
made them profoundly ignorant of all the ante- 
cedents of the struggle, insomuch that it was not 
generally believed in England, for the first year or 
two of the war, that the quarrel was one of slavery. 
There were men of high principle and unquestion- 
able liberahty of opinion, who thought it a dispute 
about tariffs, or assimilated it to the cases in which 
they were accustomed to sympathize, of a people 
struggling for independence. 

It was my obvious duty to be one of the small 
minority who protested against this perverted state 
of public opinion. I was not the first to protest. 
It ought to be remembered to the honour of Mr. 



270 THE CIVIL WAR 

Huglies and of Mr. Ludlow, that they, by wiltings 
published at the very beginning of the struggle, 
began the protestation. Mr. Bright followed in one 
of the most powerful of his speeches, followed by 
others not less striking. I was on the point of 
adding my word to theirs, when there occurred, 
towards the end of 1861, the seizure of the Southern 
envoys on board a British vessel, by an officer of the 
United States. Even English forgetfulness has not 
yet had time to lose all remembrance of the explosion 
of feeling in England which then burst forth, the 
expectation, which prevailed for some weeks, of war 
with the United States, and the warlike preparations 
actually commenced on this side. While this state 
of things lasted, there was no chance of a hearing 
for anything favourable to the American cause ; and, 
moreover, I agreed with those who thought the act un- 
justifiable, and such as to require that England should 
demand its disavowal. When the disavowal came, and 
the alarm of war was over, I wrote, in January, 1862, 
the paper, in Eraser s Magazine, entitled " The Contest 
in America." * ^'^ '"' '"' ^'' 

^ ^^ * Written and published 

when it was, this paper helped to encourage those 
Liberals who had felt overborne by the tide of 
illiberal opinion, and to form in favour of the good 
cause a nucleus of opinion which increased gradually, 
and, after the success of the North began to seem 



. IN AMERICA. 271 

probable, rapidly. When we returned from our 
journey I wrote a second article, a review of Pro- 
fessor Cairnes' book, published in the Westminster 
Review. England is pajdng the penalty, in many 
uncomfortable ways, of the durable resentment 
which her ruKng classes stirred up in the United 
States by their ostentatious wishes for the rum of 
America as a nation : they have reason to be thankful 
that a few, if only a few, known writers and speakers, 
standing firmly by the Americans in the time of their 
greatest difficulty, effected a partial diversion of these 
bitter feehngs, and made Great Britain not altogether 
odious to the Americans. 

This duty having been performed, my prmcipal 
occupation for the next two years was on subjects not 
political. The publication of Mr. Austin's Lectures 
on Jurisprudence after his decease, gave me an oppor- 
tunity of paying a deserved tribute to his memory, and 
at the same time expressing some thoughts on a sub- 
ject on which, in my old days of Benthamism, I had 
bestowed much study. But the chief product of those 
years was the Examination of Sir William Hamilton's 
Philosophy. His Lectures, published in 1860 and 
1861, I had read towards the end of the latter year, 
with a half-formed intention of giving an account of 
them in a Beview, but I soon found that this would 
be idle, and that justice could not be done to the 
subject in less than a volume. I had then to con- 



272 EXAMINATION OF 

sider whetlier it would be advisable that I myself 
should attempt such a performance. On considera- 
tion, there seemed to be strong reasons for doing so. 
I was greatly disappointed with the Lectures. I 
read them, certainly, with no prejudice against Sir 
William Hamilton. I had up to that time deferred 
the study of his Notes to Heid on account of their 
unfinished state, but I had not neglected his " Discus- 
sions in Philosophy ;" and though I knew that his 
general mode of treating the facts of mental philosophy 
differed from that of which I most approved, yet his 
vigorous polemic p^gainst the later Transcendentalists, 
and his strenuous assertion of some important princi- 
ples, especially the E^elativity of human knowledge, 
gave me many points of sympathy with his opinions, 
and made me think that genuine psychology had con- 
siderably more to gain than to lose by his authority 
and reputation. His Lectures and the Dissertations 
on Eeid dispelled this illusion : and even the Discus- 
sions, read by the light which these throw^ on them, 
lose much of their value. I found that the points of 
apparent agreement between his opinions and mine 
Avere more verbal than real ; that ' the important 
philosophical princi23les which I had thought he 
recognised, were so explained a^^y by him as to 
mean little or nothing, or were continually lost 
sight of, and d-octrines entirely inconsistent with 
them were taught in nearly every part of his philo- 



SIB WILLIAM Hamilton's philosophy. 273 

sopMcal writings. My estimation of him was tliere- 
fore so far altered, that instead of regarding him as 
occupying a kind of intermedie-te position between 
the two rival philosophies, holding some of the 
principles of both, and supplying to both powerful 
weapons of attack and defence, I now looked upon 
him as one of the pillars, and in this country from his 
high philosophical reputation the chief pillar, of that 
one of the two which seemed to me to be erroneous. 

Now, the difPerence between these two schools of 
philosophy, that of Intuition, and that of Experience 
and Association, is not a mere matter of abstract 
speculation ; it is full of practical consequences, and 
lies at the foundation of all the greatest differences 
of practical opinion in an age of progress. The 
practical reformer has continually to demand that 
changes be made in things which are supported by 
powerful and widely-spread feelings, or to question 
the apparent necessity and indefeasibleness of esta- 
blished facts ; and it is often an indispensable part 
of his argument to show, how those powerful feelings 
had their origin, and how those facts came to seem 
necessary and indefeasible. There is therefore a 
natural hostility between him and a philosophy 
which discourages the explanation of feelings and 
moral facts by circumstances and association, and 
prefers to treat them as ultimate elements of human 
nature ; a philosophy which is addicted to holding 

T 



274 EXAMINATION OF 

up favourite doctrines as intuitive trutLs, and 
deems intuition to be tlie voice of Nature and of 
God, speaking with an authority higher than that of 
our reason. In particular, I have long felt that the 
prevailing tendency to regard all the marked dis- 
tinctions of human character as innate, and in the 
main indelible, and to ignore the h-resistible proofs 
that by far the greater part of those differences, 
whether between individuals, races, or sexes, are 
such as not only might but naturally would be pro- 
duced by differences in circumstances, is one of the 
chief hindrances to the rational treatment of great 
social questions, and one of the greatest stumbling 
blocks to human improvement. This tendency has 
its source in the intuitional metaphysics which 
characterized the reaction of the nineteenth century 
against the eighteenth, and it is a tendency so 
agreeable to human indolence, as well as to con- 
servative interests generally, that unless attacked at 
the very root, it is sure to be carried to even a 
greater length than is really justified by the more 
moderate forms of the intuitional philosophy. That 
philosophy, not always in its moderate forms, had 
ruled the thought of Europe for the greater part 
of a century. My father's Analysis of the Mind, 
my own Logic, and Professor Bain^s great treatise, 
had attempted to re-introduce a better mode of 
philosophizing, latterly with quite as much success as 



SIR WILLIAM Hamilton's philosophy. 275 

could be expected ; but I had for some time felt tliat 
tlie mere contrast of the two philosophies was not 
enough, that there ought to be a hand-to-hand fight 
between them, that controversial as well as exposi- 
tory writings were needed, and that the time v/as 
come when such controversy would be useful. Con- 
sidering then the writings and fame of Sir W. 
Hamilton as the great fortress of the intuitional 
philosophy in this country, a fortress the more formi- 
dable from the imposing character, and the in m.any 
.respects great personal merits and mental endow- 
ments, of the man, I thought it might, be a real 
service to philosophy to attempt a thorough exami- 
nation of all his most important doctrines, and an 
estimate of his general claims to eminence as a 
philosopher, and I was confirmed in this resolution 
by observing that in the writings of at least one, and 
him one of the ablest, of Sir W. Hamilton's fol- 
lowers, his peculiar doctrines were made the justifi- 
cation of a view of religion which I hold to be 
profoundly immoral — that it is our duty to bow down 
in worship before a Being whose moral attributes are 
afiirmed to be unknowable by us, and to be perhaps 
extremely difierent from those which, when we are 
speaking of our fellow creatures, we call by the same 
names. 

As I advanced in my task, the damage to Sir W. 
Hamilton's reputation becptme greater than I at first 

T 2 



276 EXAMINATION OP 

expected, through the almost incredible multitude of 
inconsistencies which showed themselves on com- 
paring different passages with one another. It was 
my business, however, to show things exactly as 
they were, and I did not flinch from it. I endea- 
voured always to treat the philosopher whom I 
criticised with the most scrupulous fairness ; and I 
knew that he had abundance of disciples and admirers 
to correct me if 1 ever unintentionally did him 
injustice. Many of them accordingly have answered 
me, more or less elaborately ; and they have pointed 
out oversights and misunderstandings, though few in 
number, and mostly very unimportant in substance. 
Such of those as had (to my knowledge) been pointed 
out before the publication of the latest edition (at 
present the thkd) have been corrected there, and the 
remainder of the criticisms have been, as far as 
seemed necessary, replied to. On the whole, the 
book has done its ^yoTk : it has shown the weak side 
of Sir WiDiam Hamilton, and has reduced his too 
great philosophical reputation within more m_oderate 
bounds ; and by some of its discussions, as well as 
by two expository chapters, on the notions of Matter 
and of Mind, it has perhaps thrown additional light 
on some of the disputed questions in the domain of 
psychology and metaphysics. 

After the completion of the book on Hamilton, I 
applied myself to a task which a variety of reasons 



SIR WILLIAM Hamilton's philosophy. 277 

seemed to render specially incumbent upon me ; that 
of giving an account, and forming an estimate, of the 
doctrines of Auguste Comte. I had contributed 
more than any one else to make his speculations 
known in England, and, in consequence chiefly of 
what I had said of him in my Logic, he had readers 
and admirers among thoughtful men on this side of 
the Channel at a time when his name had not yet 
in France emerged from obscurity. So unknown 
and unappreciated was he at the time when my 
Logic was written and published, that to criticise 
his weak points might well appear superfluous, while 
it was a duty to give as much publicity as one could 
to the important contributions he had made to 
philosophic thought. At the time, however, at 
which I have now arrived, this state of affairs had 
entirely changed. His name, at least, was known 
almost universally, and the general character of his 
doctrines very widely. He had taken his place in 
the estimation both of friends and opponents, as one 
of the conspicuous figures in the thought of the age. 
The better parts of his speculations had made great 
progress in .working their way into those minds, 
which, by their previous culture and tendencies, were 
fitted to receive them : under cover of those better 
parts those of a worse character, greatly developed 
and added to in his later writings, had also made 
some way, having obtained active and enthusiastic 



278 GENEEAL VIEV/ OF 

adherents, some of them of no inconsiderable per- 
sonal merit, in England, France, and other countries. 
These causes not only made it desirable that some 
one should undertake the task of sifting what is 
good from what is bad in M, Comte's speculations, 
but seemed to impose on myself in particular a 
special obligation to make the attempt. This I 
accordingly did in two essays, published in suc- 
cessive numbers of the Westminster Review, and 
reprinted in a small volume under the title '' Auguste 
Comte and Positivism." 

The writings which I have now mentioned, toge- 
ther with a small number of papers in periodicals 
which I have not deemed worth preserving, were 
the whole of the products of my activity as a writer 
during the years from 1859 to 1865. In the early 
part of the last-mentioned year, in compliance with 
a wish frequently expressed to me by working men, 
I published cheap People's Editions of those of my 
writings which seemed the most likely to find 
readers among the working classes ; viz., Principles 
of Political Economy, Liberty, and Representative 
Government. This was a considerable sacrifice of my 
pecuniary interest, especially as I resigned all idea 
of deriving profit from the cheap editions, and after 
ascertaining from my publishers the lowest price 
which they thought would remunerate them on the 
usual terms of an equal division of profits, I gave up 



THE REMAINDER OF MY LIFE. 279 

my half share to enable the price to be fixed still 
lower. To the credit of Messrs. Longman they 
fixed, unasked, a certain number of years after 
which the copyright and stereotype plates were to 
revert to me, and a certain number of copies after the 
sale of which I should receive half of any further 
profit. This number of copies (which in the case of 
the Pohtical Economy was 10,000) has for some 
time been exceeded, and the People's Editions have 
begun to yield me a small but unexpected pecuniary 
return, though very far from an equivalent for the 
diminution of profit from the Library Editions. 

In this summary of my outward life I have now 
arrived at the period at which my tranquil and 
retired existence as a writer of books was to be 
exchanged for the less congenial occupation of a 
member of the House of Commons. The proposal 
made to me early in 1865, by some electors of West- 
minster, did not present the idea to me for the first 
time. It was not even the first offer I had received, 
for, more than ten years previous, in consequence of 
my opinions on the Irish Land Question, Mr. Lucas 
and Mr. Dufiy, in the name of the popular party in 
Ireland, offered to bring me into Parliament for an 
Irish county, which they could easily have done : 
but the incompatibility of a seat in Parliament with 
the office I then held in the India House, precluded 
even consideration of the proposal. After I had 



280 PAELIAMENTAEY LIFE. 

quitted the India House, several of my friends would 
gladly have seen me a member of Parliament ; but 
there seemed no probability that the idea would 
ever take any practical shape. I was convinced 
that no numerous or influential portion of any 
electoral body, really wished to be represented by 
a person of my opinions ; and that one who pos- 
sessed no local connexion or popularity, and who 
did not choose to stand as the mere organ of a 
party, had small chance of being elected anywhere 
unless through the expenditure of money. Now 
it was, and is, my fixed conviction, that a candi- 
date ought not to incur one farthing of expense 
for undertaking a public duty. Such of the lawful 
expenses of an election as have no special reference 
to any particular candidate, ought to be borne as a 
public charge, either by the State or by the 
locality. What has to be done by the supporters 
of each candidate in order to bring his claims 
properly before the constituency, should be done 
by unpaid agency, or by voluntary subscription. If 
members of the electoral body, or others, are willing 
to subscribe money of their own for the purpose of 
bringing, by lawful means, into Parliament some one 
who they think would be useful there, no one is 
entitled to object : but that the expense, or any 
part of it, should fall on the candidate, is funda- 
mentally wrong ; because it amounts in reality to 



PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. * 28 i 

buying Kis seat. Even on the most favourable sup- 
position as to the mode in. which the money is ex- 
pended, there is a legitimate suspicion that any one 
who gives money for leave to undertake a public 
trust, has other than public ends to promote by it ; 
and (a consideration of the greatest importance) the 
cost of elections, when borne by the candidates, 
deprives the nation of the services, as members of 
Parliament, of all who cannot or will not afford to 
incur a heavy expense. I do not say that, so long 
as there is scarcely a chance for an independent 
candidate to come into Parliament without com- 
plying with this vicious practice, it must always be 
morally wrong in him to spend money, provided that 
no part of it is either directly or indirectly employed 
in corruption. But, to justify it, he ought to be 
very certain that he can be of more use to his 
country as a member of Parliament than in any 
other mode which is open to him; and this assurance, 
in my own case, I did not feel. It was by no means 
clear to me that I could do more to advance the 
public objects which had a claim on my exertions, 
from the benches of the House of Commons, than 
from the simple position of a writer. I felt, there- 
fore, that I ought not to seek election to Parlia- 
ment, much less to exj)end any money in pro- 
curing it. 

But the conditions of the question were con- 



282 PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 

siderably altered when a body of electors souglit 
me out, and spontaneously offered to bring me 
forward as their candidate. If it should ptppear, on 
explanation, that they persisted in this wish, knowing 
my opinions, and accepting the only conditions on 
which I could conscientiously serve, it was ques- 
tionable whether this was not one of those calls upon 
a member of the community by his fellow- citizens, 
which he was scarcely justified in rejecting. I there- 
fore put their disposition to the proof by one of the 
frankest explanations ever tendered, I should think, 
to an electoral body by a candidate. I wrote, in reply 
to the offer, a letter for publication, saying that I had 
no personal wish to be a member of Parliament, that 
I thought a candidate ought neither to canvass nor 
to incur any expense, and that I could not consent 
to do either. I said further, that if elected, I could 
not undertake to give any of my time and labour to 
their local interests. With respect to general politics, 
I told them without reserve, what I thought on a 
number of important subjects on which they had 
asked my opinion ; and one of these being the 
suffrage, I made known to them, among other things, 
my conviction (as I was bound to do, since I 
intended, if elected, to act on it), that women were 
entitled to representation in Parliament on the same 
terms with men. It was the first time, doubtless, 
that such a doctrine had ever been mentioned to 



PARLIAMENTAPvY LIFE, 283 

English, electors ; and the fact that I was elected 
after proposing it, gave the start to the movement 
which has since become so vigorous, in favour ol 
women's suffrage. Nothing, at the time, appeared 
more unlikely than that a candidate (if candidate I 
could be called) whose professions and conduct set so 
completely at defiance all ordinary notions of elec- 
tioneering, should nevertheless be elected. A well- 
known literary man was heard to say that the 
Almighty himself would have no chance of being 
elected on such a programme. I strictly adhered to 
it, neither spending money nor canvassing, nor did I 
take any personal part in the election, until about a 
week preceding the day of nomination, when I 
attended a few public meetings to state my prin- 
ciples and give answers to any questions which the 
electors might exercise their just right of putting to 
me for their own guidance ; answers as plain and 
unreserved as my address. On one subject only, 
my religious opinions, I announced from the 
beginning that I would answer no questions ; a deter- 
mination which appeared to be completely approved 
by those who attended the meetings. My frank- 
ness on all other subjects on which I was interrogated, 
evidently did me far more good than my answers, 
whatever theymight be, did harm. Among the proofs 
I received of this, one is too remarkable not to be 
recorded. In the pamphlet, " Thoughts on Parlia- 



284 PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 

mentary Eeform," I had said, rather bluntly, that 
the working classes, though differing from those of 
some other countries, in being ashamed of lying, are 
yet generally hars. This passage some opponent got 
printed in a placard, which was handed to me at a 
meeting, chiefly composed of the working classes, and 
I was asked whether I had written and published it. 
I at once answered "I did." Scarcely were these 
two words out of my mouth, when vehement applause 
resounded through the whole meeting. It was evident 
that the working people were so accustomed to expect 
equivocation and evasion from those who sought their 
suffrages, that when they found, instead of that, a 
direct avowal of what was likely to be disagreeable 
to them, instead of being affronted, they concluded 
at once that this was a person whom they could 
trust. A more striking instance never came under 
my notice of what, I believe, is the experience of 
those who best know the working classes, that the 
most essential of all recommendations to their favour 
is that of complete straightforwardness ; its presence 
outweighs in their minds very strong objections, 
while no amount of other qualities will make amends 
for its apparent absence. The first vf orking man who 
spoke after the incident I have mentioned (it was 
Mr. Odger) said, that the working classes had no 
desire not to be told of their faults ; they wanted 
friends, not flatterers, and felt under obligation to 



PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 285 

any one who told them anything in themselves which 
he sincerely believed to require amendment. And 
to this the meeting heartily responded. 

Had I been defeated in the election, I should still 
have had no reason to regret the contact it had 
brought me into with large bodies of my country- 
men ; which not only gave me much new experience, 
but enabled me to scatter my political opinions more 
widely, and, by making me known in many quarters 
where I had never before been heard of, increased 
the number of my readers, and the presumable influ- 
ence of my writings. These latter effects were of 
course produced in a still greater degree, when, as 
much to my surprise as to that of any one, I was 
returned to Parliament by a majority of some 
hundreds over my Conservative competitor. 

I was a member of the House during the three 
sessions of the Parliament which passed the Peform 
Bill ; during which time Parliament was necessarily 
my main occupation, except during the recess. I 
was a tolerably frequent speaker, sometimes of pre- 
pared speeches, sometimes extemporaneously. But 
my choice of occasions was not such as I should have 
made if my leading object had been Parliamentary 
influence. When I had gained the ear of the House, 
which I did by a successful speech on Mr. Gladstone's 
Reform Bill, the idea I proceeded on was that when 
anything was likely to be as well done, or sufficiently 



286 PARLIAMENTARY LIEB. 

well done, by other people, there was no necessity 
for me to meddle with it. As I, therefore, in general 
reserved -myself for work which no others were likely 
to do, a great proportion of my appearances were on 
points on which the bulk of the Liberal party, even 
the advanced portion of it, either were of a different 
opinion from mine, or were comparatively indifferent. 
Several of my speeches, especially one against the 
motion for the abolition of capital punishment, and 
another in favour of resuming the right of seizing 
enemies' goods in neutral vessels, were opposed to 
what then was, and probably still is, regarded as the 
advanced Liberal opinion. My advocacy of women's 
suffrage and of Personal Representation, were at the 
time looked upon by many as whims of my own ; but 
the great progress since made by those opinions, and 
especially the response made from almost all parts of 
the kingdom to the demand for women's suffrage, 
fully justified the timeliness of those movements, 
and have made what was undertaken as a moral and 
social duty, a personal success. Another duty which 
was particularly incumbent on me as one of the metro- 
politan members, was the attempt to obtain a 
Municipal Government for the Metropolis : but on 
that subject the indifference of the Hou ie of Commons 
was such that I found hardly any help or support 
within its walls. On this subject, however, I was 
the organ of an active and intelligent body of persona 



PARLI OIENTARY LIFE. 287 

outside, with wliom, and not with me, the scheme 
originated, and who carried on all the agitation on the 
subject and drew up the Bills. My part was to 
bring in Bills already prepared, and to sustain the 
discussion of them during the short time they were 
allowed to remain before the House ; after having 
taken an active part in the work of a Committee 
presided over by Mr. Ayrton, which sat through the 
greater part of the session of 1866, to take evidence 
on the subject. The very different position in which 
the question now stands (1870) may justly be attri- 
buted to the preparation which went on during those 
years, and which produced but little visible effect at 
the time ; but all questions on which there are strong 
private interests on one side, and only the public 
good on the other, have a similar period of incubation 
to go through. 

The same idea, that the use of my being in Par- 
liament was to do work which others were not able 
or not willing to do, made me think it my duty to 
come to the front in defence of advanced Liberalism 
on occasions when the obloquy to be encountered 
was such as most of the advanced Liberals in the 
House, preferred not to incur. My first vote in the 
House was in support of an amendment in favour of 
teland, moved by an Lish member, and for which 
only five English and Scotch votes were given, in- 
cluding my own : the other four were Mr. Bright, Mr. 



288 PAELIAMENTAKY LIFE. 

McLaren, Mr. T. B. Potter, and Mr. Hadfield. And 
the second speech I delivered'"' was on the Bill to 
prolong the suspension of the Habeas Corpus in 
Ireland. In denouncing, on this occasion, the English 
mode of governing Ireland, I did no more than the 
general opinion of England now admits to have been 
just ; but the anger against Fenianism was then in 
all its freshness ; any attack on what Fenians attacked 
was looked upon as an apology for them ; and I was 
so unfavourably received by the House, that more 
than one of my friends advised me (and my own 
judgment agreed with the advice) to wait, before 
speaking again, for the favourable opportunity that 
would be given by the first great debate on the 
Reform BiU. During this silence, many flattered 
themselves that I had turned out a failure, and that 
they should not be troubled with me any more. 
Perhaps their uncomplimentary comments may, by 
the force of reaction, have helped to make my speech 
on the Reform Bill the success it was. My position 
in the House was further improved by a speech in 
which I insisted on the duty of paying off the National 
Debt before our coal supplies are exhausted, and by 

* The first was in answer to Mr. Lowe's rejjly to Mr. Bright on the 
Cattle Plague Bill, and was thought at the time to have helped to get 
rid of a provision in the Government measure which would have given 
to landholders a second indemnity, after they had already been once 
indemnified for the loss of some of their cattle by the increased 
selling price of the remainder. 



PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 289 

a,n ironical reply to some of the Tory leaders wlio had 
quoted against me certain passages of my writings, 
and called me to account for others, especially for one 
in my " Considerations on Representative Govern- 
ment," which said that the Conservative party was, 
by the law of its composition, the stupidest party. 
They gained nothing by drawing attention to the 
passage, which up to that time had not excited any 
notice, but the sobriquet of "the stupid party'' 
stuck to them for a considerable time afterwards. 
Having now no longer any apprehension of not being 
listened to, I confined myself, as I have since thought 
too much, to occasions on which my services seemed 
specially needed, and abstained more than enough 
from speaking on the great party questions. With 
the exception of Irish questions, and those which 
concerned the working classes, a single speech on 
Mr. Disraeli's Beform Bill was nearly all that I 
contributed to the great decisive debates of the last 
two of my three sessions. 

I have, however, much satisfaction in looking back 
to the part I took on the two classes of subjects just 
mentioned. With regard to the working classes, the 
chief topic of my speech on Mr. Gladstone's Beform 
Bill was the assertion of their claims to the suffrage. 
A little later, after the resignation of Lord Bussell's 
Ministry and the succession of a Tory Government, 
came the attempt of the working classes to hold a 

U 



290 PARLIAMENTARY LITE. 

meeting in Hyde Park, their exclusion by the police, 
and the breaking down of the park railing by the 
crowd. Though Mr. Beales and the leaders of 
the working men had retired under protest when 
this took place, a scuffle ensued in which many in- 
nocent persons were maltreated by the police, and 
the exasperation of the working men was extreme. 
They showed a determination to make another 
attempt at a meeting in the Park, to which many of 
them would probably have come armed ; the Govern- 
ment made military preparations to resist the attempt, 
and something very serious seemed impending. At 
this crisis I really believe that I was the means of 
preventing much mischief I had in my place in 
Parliament taken the side of the working men, and 
strongly censured the conduct of the Government. I 
was invited, with several other Radical members, to a 
conference with the leading members of the Council 
of the Reform League ; and the task fell chiefly upon 
myself, of persuading them to give up the Hyde Park 
project, and hold their meeting elsewhere. It was 
not Mr, Beales and Colonel Dickson who needed 
persuading ; on the contrary, it was evident that 
these gentlemen had already exerted their influence 
in the same direction, thus far without success. It 
was the working men who held out, and so bent 
were they on their original scheme, that I was obhged 
to have recourse to les grands moyens, I told them 



PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 291 

that a proceeding which would certainly produce a 
collision with the military, could only be justifiable 
on two conditions : if the position of affairs had 
become such that a revolution was desirable, and if 
they thought themselves able to accomplish one. To 
this argument, after considerable discussion, they at 
last yielded : and I was able to inform Mr. Walpole 
that their intention was given up. I shall never 
forget the depth of his relief or the warmth of his 
expressions of gratitude. After the working men 
had conceded so much to me, I felt bound to comply 
with their request that I would attend and speak 
at their meeting at the Agricultural HaU ; the only 
meeting called by the Reform League which I ever 
attended. I had always declined being a member 
of the League, on the avowed ground that I did not 
agree in its programme of manhood suffrage and the 
ballot : from the ballot I dissented entirely ; and I 
could not consent to hoist the flag of manhood 
suffrage, even on the assurance that the exclusion 
of women was not intended to be implied ; since if 
one goes beyond what can be immediately carried, 
and professes to take one's stand on a principle, one 
should go the whole length of the principle. I have 
entered thus particularly into this matter because 
my conduct on this occasion gave great displeasure 
to the Tory and Tory-Liberal press, who have charged 
me ever since with having shown myself, in the trials 

U 2 



292 PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 

of I ublic life, intemperate and passionate. I do not 
know what they expected from me ; but they had 
reason to be thankful to me if they knew from what 
I had, in all probability, preserved them. And I do 
not believe it could have been done, at that particular 
juncture, by any one else. No other person, I believe, 
had at that moment the necessary influence for re- 
straining the working classes, except Mr. Gladstone 
and Mr. Bright, neither of whom was available : Mr. 
Gladstone for obvious reasons ; Mr. Bright because he 
was out of town. 

When, some time later, the Tory Government 
brought in a Bill to prevent public meetings in the 
Parks, I not only spoke strongly in opposition to it, 
but formed one of a number of advanced Liberals, 
who, aided by the very late period of the session, 
succeeded in defending the Bill by what is called 
talking it out. It has not since been renewed. 

On Irish affairs also I felt bound to take a decided 
part. I was one of the foremost in the deputa- 
tion of members of Parliament who prevailed on Lord 
Derby to spare the life of the condemned Fenian 
insurgent. General Burke. The Church question was 
so vigorously handled by the leaders of the party, in 
the session of 1868, as to require no more from me 
than an emphatic adhesion : but the land question was 
by no means in so advanced a position : the supersti- 
tions of landlordism had up to that time been little 



PAELIAMENTARY LIFE. 293 

cliallenged, especially in Parliament, and tlie back- 
ward state of the question, so far as concerned the 
Parliamentary mind, was evidenced by the extremely 
mild measure brought in by Lord Russell's Govern- 
ment in 1866, which nevertheless could not be car- 
ried. On that Bill I delivered one of my most 
careful speeches, in which I attempted to lay down 
some of the principles of the subject, in a manner 
calculated less to stimulate friends, than to conciliate 
and convince opponents. The engrossing subject of 
Parliamentary Reform prevented either this Bill, 
or one of a similar character brought in by Lord 
Derby's Government, from being carried through. 
They never got beyond the second reading. Mean- 
while the signs of Irish disaifection had become much 
more decided ; the demand for complete separation 
between the two countries had assumed a menacing 
aspect, and there were few who did not feel that if 
there was still any chance of reconciling Ireland to 
the British connexion, it could only be by the adop- 
tion of much more thorough reforms in the territorial 
and social relations of the country, than had yet been 
contemplated. The time seemed to me to have come 
when it would be useful to speak out my whole 
mind ; and the result was my pamphlet " England 
and Ireland," which was written in the winter of 
1867, and published shortly before the commence- 
ment of the session of 1868. The leading features of 



294 PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 

the pamplilet were, on the one hand, an argument to 
show the undesirableness, for Ireland as well as for 
England, of separation between the countries, and 
on the other, a proposal for settling the land ques- 
tion by giving to the existing tenants a permanent 
tenure, at a fixed rent, to be assessed after due 
inquiry by the State. 

The pamphlet was not popular, except in Ireland, 
as I did not expect it to be. But, if no measure 
short of that which I proposed would do full justice 
to Ireland, or afford a prospect of conciliating the 
mass of the Irish people, the duty of proposing it 
was imperative ; while if, on the other hand, there was 
any intermediate course which had a claim to a trial, 
I well knew that to propose something which would 
be called extreme, was the true way not to impede 
but to facilitate a more moderate experiment. It is 
most improbable that a measure conceding so much to 
the tenantry as Mr. Gladstone's Irish Land Bill, 
would have been proposed by a Government, or 
could have been carried througli Parliament, unless 
the British public had been led to perceive that a 
case might be made, and perhaps a party formed, for 
a measure considerably stronger. It is the character 
of the British people, or at least of the higher and 
middle classes who pass muster for the British 
people, that to induce them to approve of any 
change, it is necessary that they should look upon 



PAELIAMENTARY LIFE. 295 

it as a middle course : they think every proposal 
extreme and violent unless Lliey hear of some other 
proposal going still farther, upon which their anti- 
j^athy to extreme views may discharge itself So it 
piMved m the present instance ; my proposal was 
condemned, but any scheme for Irish Land reform, 
short of mine, came to be thought moderate by com- 
parison. I may observe that the attacks made on 
my plan usually gave a very incorrect idea of its 
nature. It was usually discussed as a proposal that 
the State should buy up the land and become the 
universal landlord ; though in fact it only offered to 
each individual landlord this as an alternative, if 
he liked better to seU his estate than to retam it on 
the new conditions ; and I fully anticipated that 
most landlords would continue to prefer the position 
of landowners to that of Government annuitants, and 
would retain their existing relatioB. to their tenants, 
often on more indulgent terms than the full rents on 
which the compensation to be given them by Govern- 
ment would have been based. This and many other 
explanations I gave in a speech on Ireland, in the 
debate on Mr. Maguire s resolution, early in the 
session of 1868. A corrected report of this speech, 
together with my speech on ]\Ir. Fortescue's Bill, 
has been published (not by me, but with my per- 
mission) in Ireland. 

Another public duty, of a most serious kind, it 



296 PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 

was my lot to have to perform, both in and out of 
Parliament, during these years. A disturbance in 
Jamaica, provoked in the first instance by injustice, 
and exaggerated by rage and panic into a pre- 
meditated rebellion, had been the motive or excuse 
for taking hundreds of innocent lives by military 
violence, or by sentence of what were called courts- 
martial, continuing for weeks after the brief distur- 
bance had been put down ; with many added atrocities 
of destruction of property, flogging women as well as 
men, and a general display of the brutal recklessness 
which usually prevails when fire and sword are let 
loose. The perpetrators of those deeds were defended 
and applauded in England by the same kind of 
people who had so long upheld negro slavery : and it 
. seemed at first as if the British nation was about to 
incur the disgrace of letting pass without even a 
protest, excesses of authority as revolting as any of 
those for which, when perpetrated by the instruments 
of other Governments, Enghshmen can hardly find 
terms sufiicient to express their abhorrence. After 
a short time, however, an indignant feeling was 
roused : a voluntary Association formed itself under 
the name of the Jamaica Committee, to take such 
deliberation and action as the case might admit of, 
and adhesions poured in from all parts of the country. 
I was abroad at the time, but I s'ent in my name to 
the Committee as soon as I heard of it, and took an 
active part in the proceedings from the time of my 



PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 297 

return. There was much more at stake than only 
justice to the Negroes, imperative as was that con- 
sideration. The question was, whether the British 
dependencies, and eventually, perhaps, Great Britain 
itself, were to be under the government of law, or of 
military licence ; whetiier the lives and persons of 
British subjects are at the mercy of any two or three 
officers however raw and inexperienced or reckless 
and brutal, whom a panic-stricken Governor, or other 
functionary, may assume the right to constitute into 
a so-called court-martial. This question could only 
be decided by an appeal to the tribunals ; and such 
an appeal the Committee determined to make. Their 
determination led to a change in the chairmanship of 
the Committee, as the chairman, Mr. Charles Buxton, 
thought it not unjust indeed, but inexpedient, to 
prosecute Governor Eyre and his principal sub- 
ordinates in a criminal court : but a numerously 
attended general meeting of the Association having 
decided this point against him, Mr. Buxton withdrew 
from the Committee, though continuing to work in 
the cause, and I was, quite unexpectedly on my own 
part, proposed and elected chairman. It became, in 
consequence, my duty to represent the Committee in 
the House of Commons, sometimes by putting questions 
to the Government, sometimes as the recipient of ques- 
tions, more or less provocative, addressed by individual 
members to myself; but especially as speaker in the 
important debate originated in the session of 1866, by 



298 PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 

Mr. Buxton : and the speech I then delivered is that 
which I should probably select as the best of my 
speeches in Parliament. '''"" For more than two years 
we carried on the combat, trying every avenue legally 
open to us, to the Courts of Criminal Justice. A 
bench of magistrates in one of the most Tory counties 
in England dismissed our case : we were more success- 
ful before the. magistrates at Bow Street ; which 
gave an opportunity to the Lord Chief Justice of the 
Queen's Bench, Sir Alexander Cockburn, for deliver- 
ing his celebrated charge, which settled the law of 
the question in favour of liberty, as far as it is in the 
power of a judge's charge to settle it. There, how- 
ever, our success ended, for the Old Bailey Grand 
Jury by throwing out our Bill prevented the case 
from coming to trial. It was clear that to bring 
English functionaries to the bar of a criminal court 
for abuses of power committed against negroes and 
mulattoes was not a popular proceeding with the 
English middle classes. We had, however, redeemed, 
so far as lay in us, the character of our country, by 
showing that there was at any rate a body of 
persons determined to use all the means which the 
law afforded to obtain justice for the injured. We 



* Among tlie most active members of the Committee were Mr. P. A. 
Taylor, M.P., always faithful and energetic in every assertion c/f 
the principles of liberty; Mr. Gold win Smith, Mr. Frederick Harrison, 
Mr. Slack, Mr. Chamerovzow, Mr. Shaen, and Mr. Chesscn, the 
Honorary Secretary of the Association, 



PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 299 

liad elicited from the highest criminal judge in the 
nation an authoritative declaration that the law was 
what we maintained it to be ; and we had given an 
emphatic warning to those who might be tempted 
to similar guilt hereafter, that, though they might 
escape the actual sentence of a criminal tribunal, 
they were not safe against being put to some trouble 
and expense in order to avoid it. Colonial governors 
and other persons in authority, will have a consider- 
able motive to stop short of such extremities in 
future. 

As a matter of curiosity I kept some specimens 
of the abusive letters, almost all of them anonymous, 
which I received while these proceedings were going 
on. They are evidence of the sympathy felt with the 
brutalities in Jamaica by the brutal part of the popu- 
lation at home. They graduated from coarse jokes, 
verbal and pictorial, up to threats of assassination. 

Among other matters of importpdice in which I 
took an active part, but which excited little interest 
in the public, two deserve particular mention. 1 
joined with several other independent Liberals in 
defeatino* an Extradition Bill introduced at the 
very end of the session of 1866, and by which, 
though surrender avowedly for political offences was 
not authorized, political refugees, if charged by a 
foreign Government Avith acts which are necessarily 
incident to all attempts at insurrection, would have 
been surrendered to be dealt with by the criminal 



300 PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 

courts of the Government against wliicli tliey liad 
rebelled : thus making the British Government an 
accomplice in the vengeance of foreign despotisms. 
The defeat of this proposal led to the appointment 
of a Select Committee (in which I was included), to 
examine and report on the whole subject of Extra- 
dition Treaties ; and the result was, that in the Ex- 
tradition Act which passed through Parliament after 
I had ceased to be a member, opportunity is given 
to any one whose extradition is demanded, of being 
heard before an English court of justice to prove 
that the offence with which he is charged, is really 
political. The cause of European freedom has thus 
been saved from a serious misfortune, and our own 
country from a great iniquity. The other subject to 
be mentioned is the fight kept up by a body of 
advanced Liberals in the session of 1868, on the 
Bribery Bill of Mr, Disraeli's Government, in which 
I took a very active part. I had taken counsel witli 
several of those who had applied their minds most 
carefully to the details of the subject — Mr. W. D. 
Christie, Serjeant Pulling, Mr. Chad wick — as well 
as bestowed much thought of my own, for the pur- 
pose of framing such amendments and additional 
clauses as might make the Bill really effective 
against the numerous modes of corruption, direct 
and indirect, which might otherwise, as there was 
much reason to fear, be increased instead of dimi- 



PAELTAMENTARY LIFE. 801 

nislied "by tlie Reform Act. We also aimed at en- 
grafting on the Bill, measures for diminishing the 
mischievous burden of what are called the legitimate 
expenses of elections. Among our many amend- 
ments, was that of Mr. Fawcett for making the 
returning officer's expenses a charge on the rates, 
instead of on the candidates ; another was the pro- 
hibition of paid canvassers, and the limitation of 
paid agents to one for each candidate ; a third was 
the extension of the precautions and penalties 
against bribery, to municipal elections, which are 
well known to be not only a preparatory school for 
bribery at Parliamentary elections, but an habitual 
cover for it. The Conservative Government, how- 
ever, when once they had carried the leading pro- 
vision of their Bill (for which I voted and spoke), 
the transfer of the jurisdiction in elections from the 
House of Commons to the Judges, made a determined 
resistance to all other improvements ; and after one 
of the most important proposals, that of Mr. Fawcett, 
had actually obtained a majority, they summoned 
the strength of their party and threw out the clause 
in a subsequent stage. The Liberal party in the 
House was greatly dishonoured by the conduct of. 
many of its members in giving no help whatever 
to this attempt to secure the necessary conditions of 
an honest representation of the people. With their 
large majority in the House they could have carried 



302 PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 

all the amendments, or better ones if tliey had better 
to propose. But it was late in the session ; members 
were eager to set about their preparations for the 
impending General Election : and while some (such 
as Sir JRobert Anstruther) honourably remained at 
their post, though rival candidates were already can- 
vassing their constituency, a much greater number 
placed their electioneering interests before their 
public duty. Many Liberals also looked with in- 
difference on legislation against bribery, thinking 
that it merely diverted pubhc interest from the 
Ballot, which they considered, very mistakenly as I 
expect it will turn out, to be a sufficient, and the only, 
remedy. From these causes our fight, though kept 
up with great vigour for several nights, was wholly 
unsuccessful, and the practices which we sought to 
render more difficult, prevailed more widely than 
ever in the first General Election held under the 
new electoral law. 

In the general debates on Mr. Disraeli's Beform 
Bill, my participation was limited to the one speech 
already mentioned ; but I made the Bill an occasion 
for bringing the two greatest improvements which 
remain to be made in Bepresentative Government, 
formally before the House and the nation. One of 
them was Personal, or, as it is called with equal 
propriety. Proportional Bepresentation. I brought 
this under the consideration of the House, by an 



PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 303 

expository and argumentative speech on Mr. Hare's 
plan ; and subsequently I was active in support of 
the very imperfect substitute for that plan, which, 
in a small number of constituencies. Parliament was 
induced to adopt. This poor makeshift had scarcely 
any recommendation, except that it was a partial 
recognition of the evil which it did so httle to 
remedy. As such, however, it was attacked by the 
same fallacies, and required to be defended on the 
same principles, as a really good measure ; and its 
adoption in a few Parliamentary elections, as well 
as the subsequent introduction of what is called the 
Cumulative Vote in the elections for the London 
School Board, have had the good effect of converting 
the equal claim of all electors to a proportional share 
in the representation, from a subject of merely 
speculative discussion, into a question of practical 
politics, much sooner, than would otherwise have 
been the case. 

This assertion of my opinions on Personal Repre- 
sentation cannot be credited with any considerable 
or visible amount of practical result. It was other- 
wise with the otl er motion which I made in the 
form of an amendment to the Peform Bill, and 
which was by far the most important, perhaps the 
only really important, public service I performed in 
the capacity of a member of Parliament : a motion 
to strike out the words which were understood to 



304 PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 

limit the elecboral franchise to males, and thereby 
to admit to the suffrage all women who, as house- 
holders or otherwise, possessed the qualification re- 
quired of male electors. For women not to make 
their claim to the suffrage, at the time when the 
elective franchise was being largely extended, would 
have been to abjure the claim altogether ; and a 
movement on the subject was begun in 1866, when 
I presented a petition for the suffrage, signed by a 
considerable number of distinguished women. But 
it was as yet uncertain whether the proposal would 
obtain more than a few stray votes in the House : 
and when, after a debate in which the speakers on 
the contrary side were conspicuous by their feeble- 
ness, the votes recorded in favour of the motion 
amounted to 73 — made up by pairs and tellers to 
above 80— the surprise was general, and the en- 
couragement great : the greater, too, because one of 
those who voted for the motion was Mr. Bright, a 
fact which could only be attributed to the im- 
pression made on him by the debate, as he had pre- 
viously made no secret of his non-concurrence in the 
proposal. * ''^ ;'^' ^^ ^^ 

I believe I have mentioned all that is worth 
remembering of my proceedings in the House. But 
their enumeration, even if complete, would give but 
an inadequate idea of my occupations during that 
period, and especially of the time taken up by cor- 



PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 305 

respondenca For many years before my election to 
Parliament, I had been continually receiving letters 
from stra.ngers, mostly addressed to me as a writer 
on philosophy, and either propounding difficulties or 
communicating thoughts on subjects connected with 
logic or political economy. In common, I suppose, 
with all who are known as political economists, I 
was a recipient of all the shallow theories and 
absurd proposals by which people are perpetually 
endeavouring to show the way to universal wealth 
and happiness by some artful reorganization of the 
currency. When there were signs of sufficient in- 
telligence m the writers to make it worth while 
attempting to put them right, I took the trouble to 
point out their errors, until the growth of my cor- 
respondence made it necessary to dismiss such per- 
sons with very brief answers. Many, however, of 
the communications I received were more worthy of 
attention than these, and in some, over-sights of 
detail were pointed out in my writings, which I was 
thus enabled to correct. Correspondence of this sort 
naturally multiplied with the multiplication of the 
subjects on which I wrote, especially those of a 
metaphysical character. But when I became a member 
of Parliament, I began to receive letters on private 
^grievances and on every imaginable subject that 
related to any kind of public affairs, however remote 
from my knowledge or pursuits. It was not my 

X 



306 PAELIAMENTAEY LIFE. 

constituents in Westminster who laid this burden 
on me : they kept with remarkable fidelity to the 
understanding on which I had consented to serve. 
I received, indeed, now and then an application from 
some ingenuous youth to procure for him a small 
Government appointment ; but these were few, and 
how simple and ignorant the writers were, was shown 
by the fact that the applications came in about 
equally whichever party was in power. My in- 
variable answer was, that it was contrary to the 
principles on which I was elected to ask favours of 
any Government. But, on the whole, hardly any 
part of the country gave me less trouble than my 
own constituents. The general mass of corre- 
spondence, however, swelled into an oppressive 
burden. ''' '"' ''' '"' "^v 



While I remained in Parliament my work as an 
author was unavoidably limited to the recess. During 
that time I wrote (besides the pamphlet on Ireland, 
already mentioned), the Essay on Plato, published in 
the Edinburgh Review, and reprinted in the third 
volume of " Dissertations and Discussions ;" and the 
address which, conformably to custom, I delivered to 
the University of St. Andrew's, whose students had 
done me the honour of electing me to the office of 



i 



PAHLIAMENTARY LIFE. 307 

Rector. In this Discourse I gave expression to 
many tliouglits and opinions which had been accumu- 
lating in me through hfe, respecting the various 
studies which belong to a liberal education, their 
uses and influences, and the mode in which they 
should be pursued to render their influences most 
beneficial. The position taken up, vindicating the 
high educational value ahke of the old classic and 
the new scientific studies, on even stronger grounds 
than are urged by most of their advocates, and 
insisting that it is only the stupid inefiiciency of the 
usual teaching which makes those studies be regarded 
as competitors instead of allies, was, I think, calcu- 
lated, not only to aid and stimulate the improve- 
ment which has happily commenced in the national 
institutions for higher education, but to difiuse juster 
ideas than we often find, even in highly educated men, 
on the conditions of the highest mental cultivation. 

During this period also I commenced (and com- 
pleted soon after I had left Parliament) the per- 
formance of a duty to philosophy and to the memory 
of my father, by preparing ?md publishing an edition 
of the " Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human 
Mind," with notes bringing up the doctrines of that 
a^dmirable book to the latest improvements in science 
and in speculation. This was a joint undertaking : 
the psychological notes being furnished in about 
equal proportions by Mr. Bain and myself, while Mr. 



308 GENERAL VIEW OF 

Grote supplied some valuable contributions on points 
in the history of philosophy incidentally raised, and 
Dr. Andrew Findlater supphed the deficiencies in 
the book which had been occasioned by the imperfect 
philological knowledge of the time when it was 
written. Having been originally published at a time 
when the current of metaphysical speculation ran 
in a quite opposite direction to the psychology of 
Experience and Association, the " Analysis" had not 
obtained the amount of immediate success which it 
deserved, though it had made a deep impression on 
many individual minds, and had largely contributed, 
through those minds, to create that more favourable 
atmosphere for the Association Psychology of which 
we now have the benefit. Admirably adapted for a 
class-book of the Experience Metaphysics, it only 
required to be enriched, and in some cases corrected, 
by the results of more recent labours in the same 
school of thought, to stand, a.s it now does, in com- 
pany with Mr. Bain's treatises, at the head of the 
systematic works on Analytic Psychology. 

In the autumn of .18G8 the Parliament which 
passed the Reform Act was dissolved, and at the 
new election for Westminster I was thrown out ; 
not to my surprise, nor, I believe, to. that of my 
principal supporters, though in the few days pre- 
ceding the election they had become more sanguine 
than before. That I should not have been elected at 



THE. REMAINDER OF MY LIFE. 309 

all would not liave required any explanation ; what 
excites curiosity is tliat I should have been elected the 
first time, or, having been elected then, should have 
been defeated afterwards. But the efforts made to 
defeat me were far greater on the second occasion 
than on the first. For one thing, the Tory Govern- 
ment was now struggling for existence, and success in 
any contest was of more importance to them. Then, 
too, all persons of Tory feelings were far more em- 
bittered against me individually than on the previous 
occasion ; many who had at first been either favour- 
able or indifferent, were vehemently opposed to my 
re-election. As I had shown in my political writings 
that I was aware of the weak points in democratic 
opinions, some Conservatives, it seems, had not been 
without hopes of finding me an opponent of demo- 
cracy : as I was able to see the Conservative side 
of the question, they presumed that, like them, I 
could not see any other side. Yet if they had really 
read my writings, they would have known that after 
giving full w^eight to all that appeared to me well 
grounded in the arguments against democracy, I 
unhesitatingly decided in its favour, while recom- 
mending that it should be accompanied by such 
iiistitutions as were consistent with its principle and 
calculated to v^ard off its inconveniences : one of the 
chief of these remedies being Proportional Kepre- 
sentation, on which scarcely any of the Conservatives 



310 GENERAL VIEW OF 

gave me any support. Some Tory expectations 
appear to have been founded on the approbation I 
had expressed of plural voting, under certain con- 
ditions : and it has been surmised that the suggestion 
of this sort made in one of the resolutions which 
Mr. Disraeli introduced into the House preparatory 
to his Reform Bill (a suggestion which meeting with 
no favour he did not press), may have been occa- 
sioned by what I had written on the point : but if 
so, it was forgotten that I had made it an express 
condition that the privilege of a pluraHty of votes 
should be annexed to education, not to property, and 
even so, had approved of it only on the supposition 
of universal suffrage. How utterly inadmissible such 
plural voting would be under the suffrage given by 
the present Keform Act, is proved, to any who could 
otherwise doubt it, by the very small weight which 
the working classes are found to possess in elections, 
even under the law which gives no more votes to 
any one elector than to any other. 

While I thus was far more obnoxious to the Tory 
interest, and to many Conservative Liberals than I 
had formerly been, the course I pursued in Par- 
liament had by no means been such as to make 
Liberals generally at all enthusiastic in my support. 
It has already been mentioned, how large a pro- 
portion of my prominent appearances had been on 
questions on which I differed from most of the 



THE REMAINDER OF MY LIFE. 311 

Liberal party, or about which they cared little, and 
how few occasions there had been on which the line 
I took was such as could lead them to attach any 
great value to me as an organ of their opinions. I 
had moreover done things which had excited, in many 
minds, a personal prejudice against me. Many 
were offended by what they called the persecution 
of Mr. Eyre : and still greater offence was taken at 
my sending a subscription to the 'election expenses 
of Mr. Bradlaugh. Having refused to be at any 
expense for my own election, and having had all its 
expenses defrayed by others, I felt under a peculiar 
obligation to subscribe in my turn where funds were 
deficient for candidates whose election was desirable. 
I accordingly sent subscriptions to nearly all the 
working class candidates, and among- others to Mr. 
Bradlaugh. He had the support of the working classes ; 
having heard him speak, I knew him to be a man of 
ability, and he had proved that he was the reve-rse of a 
demagogue, by placing himself in strong opposition 
to the prevailing opinion of the democratic party on 
two such important subjects as Malthusianism and 
Personal Representation. Men of this sort, who, 
while sharing the democratic feelings of the working 
classes, judged political questions for themselves, and 
had courage to assert their individual convictions 
against popular opposition, were needed, as it seemed 
to me, in Parliament, and I did not think that Mr. 



312 GENERAL VIEW OP 

Bradlaugh's anti-religious opinions (even tliough lie 
had been intemperate in the expression of them) ought 
to exclude him. In subscribing, however, to his elec- 
tion, I did what would have been highly imprudent 
if I had been at liberty to consider only the interests 
of my own re-election ; and, as might be expected, 
the utmost possible use, both fair and unfa^ir, was 
made of this act of mine to stir up the electors of 
Westminster against me. To these various causes, 
combined with an unscrupulous use of the usual 
pecuniary and other influences on the side of my 
Tory competitor, while none were used on my side, it 
is to be ascribed that I failed at my second election 
after having succeeded at the first. No sooner was 
the result of the election known than I received 
three or four invitations to become a candidate for 
other constituer cies, chiefly counties ; but even if 
success could ha\e been expected, and this without 
expense, I was not disposed to deny myself the relief 
of returning to private life. I had no cause to feel 
humiliated at my rejection by the electors ; and if I 
had, the feehng would have been far outweighed 
by the numerous expressions of regret which I 
received from all sorts of persons and places, and in a 
most marked degree from those members of the 
Liberal party in Parliament, with whom I had been 
accustomed to act. 

Since that time little has occurred which there is 



THE REMAINDER OF MY LIFE. 313 

need to commemorate in this place. I returned to 
my old pursuits and to the enjoyment of a country 
life in the south of Europe, alternating twice a year 
with a residence of some few weeks or months in the 
neighbourhood of London. I have written various 
articles in periodicals (chiefly in my friend Mr. 
Morley's Fortnightly Review), have made a small 
number of speeches on public occasions, have pub- 
lished the " Subjection of Women," written some 
years before, with some additions * * 

* * and have. commenced the preparation of 

matter for future books, of which it will be time to 
speak more particularly if I live to finish them. 
Here therefore, for the present, this memoir may 
close. 



THE END. 



3477-4 



] 



